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Church  Finance 
and  Social  Ethics 

By 

Francis  J.  McConnell 


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BV  770  .M25 

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McConnell, 

Francis 

John, 

1871-1953. 

Church  finance 

and 

social 

Pthicci 

CHURCH  FINANCE 
AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 


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THE  MACMILLAN  COMPANY 

NEW  YORK    •    BOSTON  •    CHICAGO  •    DALLAS 
ATLANTA  •    SAN   FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN  &  CO.,  Limited 

LONDON  •  BOMBAY  •  CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE  MACMILLAN  CO.  OF  CANADA,  Ltd. 

TORONTO 


CHURCH  FINANCE 
AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 


BY 

FRANCIS  JOHN  McCONNELL 
Bishop  of  the  Methodist  Episcopal  Church 


ll3eto  gotfe 

THE  MACMILLAN  COMPANY 
1920 

A.U  rights  reserved 


Copyright.  1920, 
By  the  MACMILLAN  COMPANY 


Set  up  and  electrotyped.     Published  November,  igao. 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

I    Preliminary 1 

II  The  Church  as  Owner        .......  16 

III  The  Church  as  Solicitor 30 

IV  The  Church  as  Philanthropist 44 

V    Christian  Expenditure 59 

YI    The  Church  as  Investor 76 

VII    The  Church  as  Employer 91 

VIII  Missionary  Effort  and  Financial  Policy    .     .  105 

IX    The  Body  of  Christ 118 


CHURCH   FINANCE  AND 
SOCIAL  ETHICS 


CHAPTER  1 

PRELIMINARY 

It  requires  only  slight  familiarity  with  the  news- 
papers to  discern  the  part  which  appeals  for  large  funds 
are  playing  in  present-day  church  activities.  Whether 
it  be  that  the  unprecedented  response  of  the  American 
public  to  philanthropic  calls  during  the  Great  War  be- 
got a  nation-wide  habit  of  extraordinary  generosity,  or 
whether  the  forced  prosperity  of  a  country  fairly  wel- 
tering in  gold  made  the  public  kindly  toward  Christian 
appeals  in  enormous  terms,  or  whether  the  desperate 
plight  in  which  European  humanity  found  itself  dur- 
ing and  at  the  close  of  the  Great  War  laid  a  new  bur- 
den upon  the  Christian  conscience,  the  fact  is  that  the 
Protestant  churches  have  asked  and  are  asking  the  Amer- 
ican people  for  sums  which  would  have  seemed  out  of  all 
reason  ten  years  ago.  One  denomination  has  already 
received  pledges  to  the  total  of  over  one-hundred  mil- 
lions of  dollars,  another  is  undertaking  a  campaign  for 
one  hundred  millions,  another  has  secured  seventy-five 
millions,  and  still  another  fifty  millions, — all  this  since 
the  close  of  the  World  War. 

1 


2      CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

"We  are  to-day  praying  for  the  union  of  the  separate 
Protestant  denominations  into  one  organic,  or  at  least 
federated,  whole.  The  advantages  which  will  come  from 
such  union  for  more  direct  and  simple  phrasing  of  the 
Christian  faith  are  obvious.  Obvious  also  is  the  elimina- 
tion of  the  scandal  of  a  divided  Protestantism  giving 
itself  to  competitive  struggle  at  home  and  abroad.  Very 
few  of  us,  however,  have  faced  the  duty  of  thinking 
through  the  implications  of  the  fact  that  such  union 
will  pour  into  some  central  treasury  masses  of  money 
beyond  all  our  present  calculations.  The  responsibili- 
ties which  will  be  lodged  in  that  centralized  office  for 
proper  coordination  and  correlation  in  the  handling  of 
money  have  not  yet  been  taken  into  the  account,  nor 
have  we  stopped  to  plan  for  the  perils  involved  for  the 
Church  in  the  very  possibility  that  such  sums  will  soon 
come  under  its  control. 

Sufficient  unto  the  day  is  the  evil  thereof, — the 
worldly-wise  tell  us  and  they  counsel  us  not  to  build 
the  bridges  before  we  get  to  the  rivers.  A  deeper  wis- 
dom, however,  knows  that  bridge  building  is  seldom  most 
successful  when  carried  forward  extemporaneously. 
The  engineer  is  always  gratified  to  know  beforehand 
whether  the  stream  can  be  bridged  at  all,  and  what 
material  is  at  hand  for  the  construction  of  bridges.  It 
is  especially  imperative  that  we  cast  a  glance  ahead  in 
view  of  the  tendency  of  discussions  about  Church- 
union  so  to  focus  themselves  on  the  specifically  ecclesi- 
astical features  that  some  apparently  commonplace  issues 
are  in  the  end  left  to  take  a  haphazard  turn. 

For  example,  representatives  of  the  Methodist  Epis- 
copal Church  and  of  the  Methodist  Episcopal  Church 
South,  recently  agreed  upon  a  plan  of  union  to  be  sub- 


PRELIMINARY  3 

mitted  to  the  supreme  legislative  bodies  of  both  churches 
for  adoption  at  the  earliest  feasible  date.  The  discus- 
sion over  Methodist  union  has  gone  on  for  years  until  the 
consummation  seems — according  to  some  prophets — al- 
most in  sight,  involving  as  it  does  the  creation  of  sub- 
stantially a  new  church  with  over  six  million  members. 
A  proposed  constitution  for  the  new  body  has  been 
outlined.  Most  elaborate  precautions  have  been  taken  to 
protect  the  rights  of  the  Southern  minority  and  to  re- 
tain the  loyalty  of  the  negro,  and  to  forestall  autocratic- 
ally-minded bishops  from  seizing  too  much  power;  all 
of  which  is  as  it  should  be.  There  is  not  in  the  instru- 
ment itself,  however,  any  save  the  most  casual  hint  as  to 
how  the  enormous  sums  of  money  raised  by  such  an  or- 
ganization are  to  be  handled.  I  am  heartily  in  favor 
of  the  union  of  Methodism,  but  as  the  proposed  constitu- 
tion now  stands  it  makes  possible  a  financial  concentra- 
tion beyond  anything  in  the  history  of  Protestantism; 
not  because  anybody  intends  or  desires  such  a  result  but 
because  this, — an  apparently  non-ecclesiastical  ''detail," 
— has  been  allowed  to  take  care  of  itself.  A  wiser  policy 
would  keep  all  such  grave  possibilities  out  in  the  open 
from  the  beginning. 

"We  apologize  for  uttering  such  commonplace  as  that 
immense  physical  resources  lodged  in  the  hands  even 
of  the  best-intentioned  Boards  are  equivalent  to  im- 
mense grants  of  power.  For  illustration  we  may  look  at 
two  foundations  which  to-day  are  influencing  the  educa- 
tional institutions  of  the  United  States.  We  refer  to 
the  funds  coming  from  the  Carnegie  properties  on  the 
one  hand  and  the  Rockefeller  properties  on  the  other. 
It  is  not  our  business  here  to  enter  into  a  discussion  of 
the  industrial  processes  by  which  the  Carnegie  and  the 


4      CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

Rockefeller  interests  came  to  success.  Very  likely  the 
laws  to-day  would  not  permit  financial  activities  of  the 
sort  displayed  forty  years  ago  by  Mr.  Carnegie  or  by 
Mr.  Rockefeller.  Probably  each  pioneer  of  industry  was 
as  good  or  as  bad  as  the  other.  In  their  defense  it  may 
be  said  that  the  social  consequences  of  control  of  rail- 
roads and  legislatures  and  even  of  public  opinion  by 
dominant  financial  groups  had  not  in  their  day  been 
thought  through.  Moreover  the  past  is  past  and  a  re- 
spectable portion  of  the  funds  of  each  magnate  is  devoted 
to  the  improvement  of  education  in  the  United  States. 
"We  are  firmly  of  the  conviction  that  both  the  Carnegie 
fund  and  the  Rockefeller  fund  for  education  have  been 
productive  of  far-reaching  good.  The  Rockefeller  fund 
has,  so  far  as  we  know,  never  been  used  in  a  meddling 
or  tinkering  spirit.  The  grants  of  money  seem  to  have 
been  voted  according  to  sound  educational  policy.  As 
to  the  Carnegie  fund  perhaps  a  careful  judgment  would 
not  be  so  favorable.  The  first  announcement  of  the 
Carnegie  purpose  led  to  a  frantic  scrambling  by  presi- 
dents of  denominational  colleges  to  cut  loose  from  church 
control  or  to  lengthen  their  tether  far  enough  to  share 
in  the  contemplated  financial  blessings.  The  oracular 
utterances  of  some  officers  of  the  Foundation  also  seemed 
to  be  based  on  the  assumption  that  control  over  such  a 
fund  made  for  final  authority  on  all  subjects  ranging 
from  pensions  and  life  insurance  to  politics  and  religion, 
though  this  was  incidental  and  added  to  the  gayety  of 
disinterested  persons.  On  the  whole,  however,  the  Car- 
negie policy  on  its  strictly  educational  side  was  probably 
sound  enough.  Granting  the  worthiness  of  the  inten- 
tions of  both  founders  and  the  correctness  of  the  methods 
with  which  the  trustees  work,  the  fact  remains  that  at 


PRELIMINARY  5 

least  for  a  generation  or  two  these  aggregations  of  money 
will  be  a  potent  factor  in  decreeing  what  colleges  in  the 
United  States  shall  survive  or  perish.  It  will  be  under- 
stood that  we  are  not  deploring  the  existence  of  such 
funds.  We  are  simply  stating  the  self-evident  as  to  their 
power. 

There  is  no  reason  to  suppose  that  the  piling  up  of 
riches  in  the  treasuries  of  the  Protestant  churches  or  of 
the  Protestant  Church,  when  union  comes,  will  generate 
energy  any  less  compelling.  The  administrators  of  the 
finances, — who  will  probably  go  by  the  innocent  title  of 
secretaries — will  have  in  their  hands  titanic  enginery 
whose  effects  will  be  felt  through  the  decades  for  good  or 
ill.  The  secretaryships  are  inevitable — as  is  their  tre- 
mendous power.  Public  understanding  of  such  power, 
however,  is  the  first  step  toward  keeping  it  humble  and 
tractable. 

In  addition  there  are  wider  considerations  of  serious 
import.  Our  fathers  were  declared  to  have  won  a  not- 
able victory  when  they  achieved  a  separation  of  Church 
and  State.  Their  sure  discernment  told  them  that  only 
harm  could  result  if  the  State  attempted  to  control  the 
Church  or  if  the  Church  sought  to  manage  the  State 
through  any  other  channel  than  reasonable  persuasion. 
In  recent  years,  however,  we  have  learned  that  no  matter 
what  the  form  of  government  at  a  given  time,  the 
economic  forces  of  that  time  try  to  get  hold  of  and  con- 
trol King  and  Parliament  or  President  and  Congress. 
This  is  not  to  suggest  anything  necessarily  wicked. 
Economic  interests  should  have  place  in  governmental 
policies.  Economics  have  more  to  do  with  the  life  of 
man  than  any  other  interests.  The  possibility  of  such 
control,  however,  makes  likely  an  invisible  government 


6      CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

behind  the  visible.  Much  of  the  harm  could  be  done 
away  with  if  the  economic  forces  were  definitely  labeled 
so  that  we  could  watch  them  at  work.  If,  for  example,  a 
railroad  manipulates  the  political  machinery  of  a  state 
so  as  to  send  to  the  senate  of  the  United  States  a  repre- 
sentative of  the  railroad  the  peril  would  be  diminished 
if  the  newly  elected  senator  could  take  his  oath  as  the 
senator  from  the  railroad.  Then  we  would  at  least  know 
where  we  were  and  what  to  expect.  There  is  a  shrewd 
jest  now  going  the  rounds  to  the  effect  that  the  United 
States  is  Bolshevist  to  the  extent  of  being  ruled  by  a 
congress  which  is  a  soviet  of  lawyers.  If  the  lawyers 
are  just  lawyers  our  plight  is  not  so  serious  as  it  is  if 
the  lawyers  are  agents  of  screened  or  masked  financial 
giants. 

Now  this  old  alliance  between  Church  and  State  which 
our  fathers  thought  dangerous  can  easily  return  to 
plague  us  if  both  Church  and  State  in  their  organized 
capacities  are  too  closely  dependent  on  economic  interests 
which  may  control  both  Church  and  State.  It  is  signifi- 
cant that  in  the  vexing  days  since  1914,  when  representa- 
tives of  this  or  that  religious  group  have  dared  to  speak 
out  against  any  war  policies  which  have  seemed  un- 
christian, the  first  patriots  to  be  shocked  and  outraged 
have  been  spokesmen  of  financial  interests  who  have 
often  called  out  that  government  should  proceed  against 
such  potential  treason.  Better  have  Church  and  State 
wrangling  with  one  another  as  to  which  is  entitled  to 
authority  over  the  other  than  to  have  both  jerked  like 
puppets  by  a  back-lying  and  irresponsible  economic 
master. 

A  second  general  consideration  arises  out  of  the  pos- 
sibility of  accumulated  resources  tying  the  Church  to 


PRELIMINARY  7 

an  established  social  and  industrial  order,  whatever  that 
order  may  be.  Human  nature  is  prone  to  identify  what- 
ever is  with  what  ought  to  be.  This  is  often  true  when 
persons  have  passed  with  middle  age  into  prosperity. 
Radical  critics  of  organized  Christianity  often  remind  us 
that  the  Church  is  just  about  a  generation  behind  the 
times.  This  is  measurably  true,  for  the  good  and  suffi- 
cient reason  that  the  ministers  and  laymen  now  in  control 
of  the  Church  were  born  about  a  generation  ago.  Having 
attained  to  a  degree  of  success  through  the  methods  in 
which  they  were  trained,  they  believe  in  the  superiority 
of  these  processes  and  are  quite  likely  to  identify  a  social 
or  industrial  state  at  any  one  moment  with  the  eternal 
verities  of  the  Christian  revelation.  Here  is  for  Chris- 
tianity an  ever-present  and  serious  peril.  We  need  not 
be  radicals  to  discern  the  manifest  flaws  in  the  industrial 
system  of  the  year  1920.  Suppose  we  grant  for  argu- 
ment's sake  that  as  an  instrument  for  production  of 
wealth  the  capitalistic  system  is  the  best  that  the  world 
has  seen.  We  could  hardly  say  much  for  the  claim, 
however,  that  the  capitalistic  system  has  been  conspicu- 
ously successful  in  the  equitable  distribution  of  wealth. 
It  may  be  that  a  producer  will  not  exert  himself  to  the 
utmost  unless  society  gives  him  the  right  to  bequeath  his 
property  to  a  great-grandson  whom  he  may  never  see,— 
and  who,  when  he  arrives,  may  be  a  knave  or  a  fool. 
Conceding  this  far  from  self-evident  truth,  we  can  not 
maintain  with  much  vigor  that  our  present  system  of  dis- 
tribution is  all  that  it  ought  to  be.  Then  if  the  mildest  re- 
forms are  in  order  we  ought  to  have  an  institutional 
Christianity  which  can  help  toward  charting  the  course 
which  the  reform  is  to  take.  The  difficulty  of  render- 
ing such  service  if  the  organized  Church  is  rooted  in  and 


8        CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

interlaced  with  the  established  order  by  the  possession 
of  great  wealth  is  altogether  too  patent. 

A  third  consideration  is  the  possibility  of  the 
Church's  becoming  conformed  to  secular  standards  by 
anxiety  over  her  earthly  possessions,  or  by  her  uncon- 
scious carrying  over  into  the  temple  a  mood  and  spirit 
begotten  in  the  business  office.  In  a  notable  address, 
while  he  was  still  President  of  Princeton,  Woodrow 
Wilson  once  called  attention  to  the  deleterious  effect  of 
the  scientific  temper  of  the  age  on  the  pursuit  of  the 
knowledge  of  higher  human  values.  In  substance  he 
said  that  it  was  as  if  the  noxious  gases  from  a  laboratory 
had  escaped  into  the  quiet  retreat  of  the  brooding  phil- 
osopher and  were  choking  him  with  their  poison.  If 
this  be  true  as  to  scholarship,  how  much  more  imminent 
is  the  peril  from  the  deadly  fumes  of  modern  industrial- 
ism for  the  pursuit  of  the  highest  Christian  ideals! 
The  estimate  of  Christian  results  in  terms  of  statistics 
is  but  one  phase  of  the  danger.  Who  doubts  that  it  is 
impossible  completely  to  square  the  New  Testament 
ideals  with  any  set  of  business  maxims  as  yet  devised? 
One  of  the  chief  glories  of  Christianity  is  the  tran- 
scendence of  its  ideals :  but  we  can  more  easily  scale  down 
the  ideal  to  meet  a  secular  mood  than  tone  up  the  worldly 
mood  to  the  Christian  requirement. 

What,  then,  shall  the  Church  do?  One  enthusiast  is 
ready  with  an  answer.  He  would  have  the  Church  cut 
loose  from  all  material  possessions  whatsoever.  He 
would  send  evangelists  and  prophets  out  upon  the  high- 
wa3^s  without  plan  for  support.  He  would  obey  literally 
the  New  Testament  injunction  to  take  no  thought  for 
the  morrow,  and  to  provide  neither  scrip  nor  raiment 
for  the  journey.     If  the  prophets  relied  upon  God  they 


PRELIMINARY  9 

would  be  fed.  If  they  were  not  fed  and  so  died  they 
would  fall  as  witnesses  to  a  splendid  ideal. 

The  sheer  vigor  of  such  eloquence  will  always  com- 
mend itself  to  some  minds,  but  after  all  Christianity  is 
in  the  world  to  save  the  world.  There  is  something  con- 
vincing about  martyrdom  when  the  victim  is  thrown  to 
the  lions  or  burned  at  the  stake.  The  martyrdom  is  not 
so  impressive  when  the  hero  dies  of  under-nourishment 
or  takes  up  a  life-insurance  agency.  If  the  Christian 
revelation  means  anything  as  to  method,  it  means  that 
the  world  is  to  be  saved  by  trained  leaders.  That  the 
training  of  prophets  in  the  olden  time  and  of  apostles 
in  the  later  day  was  not  always  conventional  and  in- 
stitutional does  not  detract  from  the  pertinence  of  this 
remark.  In  every  age  the  effective  prophets  of  God 
have  been  as  much  marked  by  intellectual  energy  as  by 
spiritual  consecration.  The  prophecies  of  Amos,  earliest 
of  the  literary  prophets,  are  classics  forever  for  the 
cogency  of  their  expression  and  the  symmetry  of  their 
form,  as  well  as  for  their  moral  and  spiritual  passion. 
But  the  problem  of  training  a  mind  for  intellectual  ef- 
fectiveness in  the  midst  of  a  highly  complex  civilization 
is  somewhat  different  from  that  of  the  day  of  the  herds- 
man of  Tekoa.  This  one  problem  of  equipping  leaders 
involves  all  the  costly  educational  apparatus  of  our 
modern  times. 

Moreover,  the  function  of  the  Church  is  not  exhausted 
in  the  vocal  articulation  of  truth.  As  divine  a  revela- 
tion as  any  in  our  day  is  that  of  the  worth  of  the  scien- 
tific method.  Fully  as  important  as  the  actual  discov- 
eries made  by  scientists  has  been  the  elaboration  of  the 
scientific  method  itself  by  which  we  mean  the  patient 
study  of  given  facts  themselves,  in  the  search  for  laws 


10      CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

which  g'ive  us  mastery  over  other  facts.  It  is  the  duty 
of  the  Church  to  capture  the  scientific  method  as  an  in- 
strument for  the  advancement  of  the  Kingdom.  Es- 
pecially is  this  a  duty  in  the  search  for  laws  which  mean 
well  or  ill  for  social  groups.  In  a  day  which  looked 
upon  sin  just  as  personal  guilt  to  be  rebuked,  the  prophet 
needed  not  so  elaborate  a  furnishing  as  in  one  which 
recognizes  that  some  evils  spring  out  of  the  constitution 
of  society  as  such.  From  now  on  and  always  a  major 
part  of  the  work  of  the  Church  will  devolve  upon  the 
prepared  expert.  The  training  of  experts,  however,  im- 
plies a  relation  to  and  dependence  upon  the  tangled  so- 
cial institutions  in  the  midst  of  which  we  live. 

What,  after  all,  is  the  function  of  the  Church?  We 
are  told  that  the  function  is  to  generate  the  moral  and 
spiritual  dynamic  out  of  which  all  progress  comes. 
Suppose,  however,  there  are  in  the  industrial  and  social 
conditions  of  a  time  obstacles  to  the  generation  of  power. 
The  entire  social  atmosphere  may  be  so  chilled  as  to 
make  it  impossible  to  start  the  fires  of  enthusiasm.  Or 
the  path  of  progress  may  be  strewn  with  innumerable 
stumbling  blocks.  Clearly,  then,  it  is  the  business  of 
the  Church  to  take  upon  itself  the  creation  of  a  new 
social  climate,  or  the  removal  of  the  social  obstacles  in 
the  name  of  the  release  of  the  higher  spiritual  energies. 
One  reason  for  a  Church's  bestirring  itself  against  the 
immeasurable  poverty,  for  example,  which  drags  down 
the  world  is  just  the  Christian  impulse  to  relieve  suffer- 
ing. But  a  further  reason  is  the  desire  of  any  genuine 
Christian  leadership  to  make  an  environment  in  which 
human  beings  can  exist  with  measurably  normal  human- 
ity. The  high-tide  spiritual  energies  of  the  race  never 
will  be  released  until  poverty  is  conquered,  or  until  there 


PRELIMINARY  11 

is  such  universal  mastery  over  nature  as  to  make  it  evi- 
dent that  if  a  man  lacks  the  material  conditions  for 
normal  human  life,  the  lack  is  his  own  fault  and  not  the 
fault  of  society  itself. 

The  first  reason  for  the  organized  Church's  not  seek- 
ing to  cut  its  connection  with  the  world  of  money  and 
property  is  because  it  cannot,  if  it  is  to  keep  a  foothold 
on  the  earth  at  all,  and  the  second  reason  is  that  example 
is  better  than  precept  in  the  crusade  to  Christianize  the 
industrial  order.  It  is  possible  for  the  Church  to  do 
something  worth  while,  in  the  trusteeship  of  its  own 
material  resources,  to  erect  an  essentially  Christian  doc- 
trine of  the  use  of  wealth.  There  is  to-day  abundant 
cataloguing  of  the  faults  of  the  Church.  Sometimes  the 
more  radical,  especially  the  younger  prophets,  seem  to 
feel  that  the  wisest  course  is  one  of  unrelenting  criticism 
of  the  Church  at  every  point  where  it  touches  industry. 
After  all,  however,  in  the  face  of  the  certainty  of  bitter- 
est censure,  sound  church  leadership  will  struggle  on  to 
work  out  into  everyday  material  deed  the  industrial  and 
social  ideals  for  which  Christianity  stands.  Any 
Church  that  thoroughly  understands  the  problem  here 
will  indeed  shrink  from  the  difficulties  of  such  a  task. 
It  might  be  easier  for  the  Church  to  send  its  ministers 
and  teachers  out  upon  the  highways  to  cry  against  the 
evils  of  the  world  without  financial  support  from  the 
Church  itself,  than  for  it  in  its  official  activities  to  find 
how  righteously  to  exist  in  an  industrial  world,  and  how 
to  sanctify  all  the  properties  coming  into  its  hands  by  in- 
telligent use  for  the  Kingdom  of  God.  We  must  not  for- 
get the  word  of  Jesus  as  to  the  difficulty  of  a  rich  man's 
entering  into  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven.  His  word  is  as 
true  for  an  institution  as  for  an  individual.    "We  must 


12      CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

not  forget  also  that  he  declared  that  with  the  help  of 
God  even  such  a  spiritual  miracle  is  possible. 

A  few  words  of  caution  are  in  order.  Let  it  be  under- 
stood that  we  have  no  dogmatic  scheme  by  which  to 
guide  ourselves  in  our  reflections.  The  Christian  system 
must  strive  for  the  fullest  and  highest  life  for  human 
beings.  It  must  recognize  that  the  object  of  all  its  en- 
deavor is  flesh-and-blood  men,  women  and  children  living 
in  this  present  world.  It  must  recognize  also  that  these 
human  beings  do  not  come  to  their  amplest  selves  apart 
from  the  multifarious  group  activities  which  consume 
so  much  of  their  energies.  It  must  realize  further  that 
the  soundest  endeavor  is  not  merely  to  make  these  lives 
bigger  in  quantitative  terms  but  to  refine  them  to  a 
higher  and  nobler  quality.  To  do  this  there  must  be 
passion  for  those  human  ideals  and  values  which  possess 
worth  for  all  time. 

Having  recognized  all  this,  however,  we  must,  we  re- 
peat, obstinately  resolve  that  we  will  not  yield  to  the 
tyranny  of  any  dogmatic  absolutes.  We  are  indeed  un- 
der the  law  of  absolute  good-will  one  toward  another,  but 
that  good-will  cannot  unerringly  tell  us  what  to  do  at  a 
given  time  or  place.  In  all  our  attempts  to  find  our 
path  in  Christian  well-doing  there  is  this  element  of 
relativity.  There  is  no  one  absolute  social  system  which 
we  can  to-day  accept  as  final.  If  we  should  all  become 
socialists,  even  Christian  socialists,  overnight,  and  should 
start  out  to-morrow  completely  cut  from  our  capitalistic 
past  in  an  environment  wholly  favorable  to  socialism, 
we  should  find  day  after  to-morrow  that  the  advocates  of 
a  still  newer  order  would  be  shouting  in  our  ears ;  and 
with  that  further  order  established  the  heralds  of  a  yet 
brighter  dawn  would  reproach  us  that  we  had  made  so 


PRELIMINARY  13 

feeble  a  beginning.  Disconcerting  to  our  dogmatic 
minds  as  it  is,  we  must  admit  that  in  industry,  as  in 
every  other  realm  of  human  conduct,  some  systems  are 
right  at  one  time,  that  they  have  their  day,  and  that 
then  the  moral  duty  becomes  that  of  helping  them  cease 
to  be.  Some  moral  courses  are  best  in  some  places  and 
worst  in  some  others.  It  is  conceivable  that  a  half 
dozen  economic  systems  of  widely  varying  degrees  of 
development  should  be  flourishing  in  as  many  different 
nations  in  one  and  the  same  year,  and  each  best  adapted 
to  its  own  national  environment. 

This  inevitable  relativity  in  moral  duties  can,  on  the 
one  hand,  be  appropriated  as  an  excuse  for  moral  laxity ; 
or  it  can,  on  the  other  hand,  be  construed  as  a  summons 
to  the  most  intense  consecration.  The  compelling  moral 
problem  for  a  man  or  for  an  institution  is  to  keep  moral- 
ity up-to-date, — or  in  other  words  to  make  every  advanc- 
ing insight  the  occasion  for  revision  of  and  progress  in 
moral  practice.  From  this  angle  of  view  the  duty  of 
the  Church  in  managing  the  material  resources  which 
are  bound  to  stream  into  ecclesiastical  coffers  in  increas- 
ing flood  is  to  take  position  at  the  head  of  those  march- 
ing toward  a  better  industrial  day  and  to  stay  there. 
This  means,  of  course,  that  such  threadbare  adages  as 
''business  is  business"  and  ''business  and  religion  can- 
not mix"  must  be  cast  out  once  and  for  all.  The  most 
damaging  criticism  passed  upon  the  Church  to-day  is 
that  its  ideals  as  to  wealth  and  its  contacts  with  riches 
and  with  rich  men  do  not  square  with  one  another.  In 
a  degree  this  must  always  be  true, — if  an  ideal  is  an 
ideal  worth  following  it  must  forever  move  on  ahead. 
But  there  is  dreadful  force  in  the  criticism,  especially 
pertinent  when  ecclesiastical  leaders  proceed  on  the  as- 


14      CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

sumption  that  in  business  the  Church  must  act  just  as 
does  any  other  business  concern.  There  must  be  some 
middle  course  between  abandoning  material  possessions 
altogether  and  yielding  to  the  ordinary  and  conventional 
business  maxims.  To  abandon  material  possessions  alto- 
gether is  physically  impossible.  To  bow  to  a  merely 
conventional  business  ethic  ought  to  be  morally  impos- 
sible. 

Here  again  some  objector  may  break  out  that  when  the 
Church  gets  into  these  business  entanglements  it  is 
neglecting  its  true  functions, — that  the  Church  is  in  the 
world  to  save  souls ;  that  is  its  only  business.  We  must 
bespeak  patience  as  we  reply  that  as  a  matter  of  fact 
the  Church  is  on  this  material  earth,  that  the  Church 
owns  lands  and  houses,  that  the  Church  invests  funds, 
that  the  Church  employs  labor,  that  in  carrying  forward 
any  enterprise  the  Church  expends  money.  This  is  true 
now,  has  always  been  true,  and  will  be  true  as  long  as 
the  world  stands.  In  view  of  this  actual  situation  we 
are  raising  the  question  as  to  how  the  Church  should 
comport  itself  so  as  not  to  hinder  the  work  of  soul  sav- 
ing,— but  rather  to  facilitate  that  salvation. 

One  further  note  of  caution.  Throughout  this  entire 
essay  we  are  to  speak  of  the  Church  in  its  organized 
form.  "We  are  discussing  the  Church  not  as  a  sum  of 
individuals  but  as  an  articulated  body  working  under 
group  laws.  We  are  occupying  ourselves  with  what  the 
Church  does  as  a  Church.  We  are  not  presuming  to 
enter  the  closet  of  individual  ethics  and  to  pass  judg- 
ment upon  the  financial  transactions  of  individuals. 
We  shall  try  not  to  forget  what  we  said  a  moment  ago 
about  the  relativity  of  obligations.  In  view  of  that 
relativity  it  may  be  permissible  for  an  individual  in 


PRELIMINARY  15 

peculiar  circumstances  to  sanction,  at  least  provision- 
ally, conduct  which  would  not  be  permissible  for  the 
official  vote  of  the  Church  to  which  that  individual  be- 
longs. We  say  this  in  the  same  breath  with  which  we 
avow  the  true  aim  of  the  Church  to  lift  the  conduct  of 
all  individual  members  up  to  the  ideal  set  as  a  standard 
by  the  Church  in  its  official  policies.  For  the  purposes 
of  this  study,  however,  the  most  severe  exactions  are 
for  the  Church,  which  is  never  to  cease  to  think  of  itself 
as  the  organized  body  of  Christ. 


CHAPTER  II 

THE   CHURCH   AS   OWNER 

The  seriousness  of  our  problem,  and  possibly  some 
hints  as  to  its  solution,  may  appear  from  viewing  one 
after  another  different  aspects  of  the  contact  of  the 
Church  with  property.  At  the  outset  it  may  be  best  to 
consider  the  Church  as  an  owner.  Much  of  the  wealth 
which  comes  into  the  ecclesiastical  treasury  will  nat- 
urally remain  in  the  possession  of  the  Church;  and 
ownership  at  once  provokes  criticism  from  many  quar- 
ters. 

We  meet,  to  begin  with,  the  objection  that  important 
sums  should  not  be  allowed  to  remain  in  the  permanent 
keeping  of  corporate  bodies  like  the  Church.  The 
Church  is  a  corporation,  and  corporations  have  no  souls. 
Harm  results  from  the  control  of  huge  funds  by  entities 
which  are  personal  only  by  legal  fiction.  Ownership 
should  be  strictly  personal.  We  have  heard  of  recent 
years  that  the  only  inherent  right  to  property  vests  in  the 
individual  human  being.  Property  which  an  individual 
has  legally  acquired  is  his  own  by  natural  and  inalienable 
justice.  It  is  an  unwarrantable  extension  of  this  right  to 
make  it  include  holdings  by  Church  corporations. 

This  leads  us  to  ask  what  constitutes  the  right  to 
ownership.  One  type  of  mind  will  of  course  have  it 
that  there  is  something  self-evidently  divine  about  the 
right  to  private  property.  We  have  been  informed  that 
one  of  the  Ten  Commandments  tells  us  not  to  steal,  and 

16 


THE  CHURCH  AS  OWNER  17 

that  the  context  lends  indirectly  a  divine  sanction  to  in- 
dividual property  holding.  There  may  indeed  be  some- 
thing divine  about  the  personal  right  to  hold  property, 
but  the  divinity  must  publish  itself  in  social  benefits. 
The  examination  of  primitive  societies  does  not  suggest 
that  the  sacredness  of  private  property  is  an  unmistak- 
able moral  intuition  peculiar  to  human  consciousness 
from  the  beginning.  Society  seems  to  have  recognized 
and  then  agreed,  and  then  enacted,  that  the  material 
goods  which  one  has  acquired  in  sanctioned  ways  shall 
be  one's  own  till  one  chooses  to  dispose  of  them.  Cen- 
turies of  experience  are  said  to  have  taught  that  the 
human  life  does  not  come  to  its  best  without  some  such 
control  over  physical  goods  as  that  which  we  see  in 
private  property.  Individual  initiative  is  smothered  out 
if  a  man  cannot  retain  power  over  the  things  which  he 
trades  for  or  produces.  Simply  because  of  the  social 
usefulness  of  private  property  we  have  had  property 
rights  enacted  into  our  fundamental  laws.  Much  abuse 
by  individual  holders  is  overlooked  because  of  the  good 
of  the  system  as  a  whole.  The  legal  title  is  a  contriv- 
ance intended  to  protect  owners  in  their  rights.  But 
full  ethical  ownership  of  material  goods  implies  high 
mastery  of  those  goods.  The  bow  of  Ulysses  belonged 
to  Ulysses  because  he  only  could  bend  that  bow.  The 
legal  title  might  have  rested  somewhere  else  but  in  just 
social  morality  Ulysses  was  the  owner.  It  is  in  the  hope, 
often  illusory  to  be  sure,  that  material  things  will  in  the 
main  get  into  the  hands  of  those  who  can  best  use  them 
that  Society  maintains  the  rights  of  private  property, 
rights  which  would  be  worthless  without  social  support. 
The  privateness  of  private  property  is  a  creation  of  the 
public  will. 


18      CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

Conceding  all  the  sacredness  of  individual  rights  im- 
aginable, however,  we  see  all  through  history  the  tend- 
ency of  Society  itself  to  regulate,  and  upon  occasion  to 
disregard,  such  rights  in  the  name  of  the  social  result. 
We  can  hardly  imagine  a  social  situation  in  which  it 
would  be  otherwise.  Where  is  there  a  community  with- 
out taxes?  Suppose  for  our  convenience  we  adopt  the 
familiar  division  of  material  things  into  two  classes,  con- 
sumers' goods  and,  producers'  goods,  though  the  division 
may  not  always  be  clear.  Consumers'  goods  are, 
roughly  speaking,  food  and  clothes  and  houses  in 
which  the  consumers  live.  Producers'  goods  are  the 
tools  with  which  they  work, — ranging  all  the  distance 
from  a  hammer  or  a  plow  to  a  railroad  or  a  steel  mill. 
Now  we  could  hardly  find  any  extreme  of  individualism 
on  the  one  hand  or  of  collectivism  or  communism  in  the 
brain  of  the  wildest  dreamer  on  the  other — even  among 
those  theories  that  say  most  about  every  man's  natural 
right  to  appropriate  from  a  social  fund  whatever  goods 
he  needs — that  would  fight  hard  for  the  right  of  a  con- 
sumer to  food  or  clothes  or  a  house  if  he  did  not  render 
some  service  to  Society  in  return.  A  few  talkers  about 
collectivism  seem  to  fancy  that  under  a  communistic 
free-for-all  the  loafer  would  have  a  fine  time.  Willing 
servants  would  bring  him  food  to  eat  and  coats  to  wear 
and  beds  in  which  to  sleep.  It  would  be  difficult  to  find 
any  formulation  of  communism  even  of  the  most  ex- 
treme type  which  would  warrant  any  such  hopes.  The 
communist  would,  indeed,  maintain  that  under  his  sys- 
tem all  men  would  gladly  serve,  but  if  they  would  not 
serve  he  would  not  make  much  more  provision  for  them 
than  our  present  competition  makes  for  chronic  and  in- 
curable laziness.     The  general  assumption  is  that  a  man 


THE  CHURCH  AS  OWNER  19 

must  work  if  lie  is  to  eat.  So  that  on  the  side  of  con- 
sumers' goods  the  right  to  property  comes,  even  among 
the  radicals,  to  be  the  right  to  be  furnished  with  material 
that  will  enable  one  to  keep  alive  enough  to  work. 

On  the  side  of  producers'  goods  there  is  not  a  scheme 
even  of  communistic  thinking  worth  looking  at  which 
would  knowingly  put  industrial  tools  into  the  hands  of 
manifest  and  confirmed  bunglers.  And  the  present  de- 
vice of  private  property,  as  we  have  said,  is  built  on  the 
expectation  that  most  men  will  get  hold  of  the  tools  which 
they  can  best  use.  But  the  aim  is  always  at  the  good  of 
the  community  as  a  whole.  Private  property,  we  re- 
peat, is  not  bom  of  the  self-evident  moral  maxims ;  it  is  a 
system  born  out  of  social  exigencies  for  the  good  of  So- 
ciety. To  be  sure,  it  has  been  allowed  to  run  unhind- 
ered to  questionable  development,  so  that  a  single  indi- 
vidual to-day  may  own  a  railroad  stretching  across  a 
continent.  The  defenders  of  this  extreme  development 
always  speak  first  of  inherent  sacredness  when  there  is 
any  revolutionary  murmur  against  private  ownership. 
But  when  they  quiet  down  to  the  defensible  argument 
they  must  justify  their  system,  if  they  can,  on  the  basis 
of  the  social  benefit. 

It  becomes  evident  then  that  the  legitimacy  of  owner- 
ship at  bottom  turns  round  the  social  consequences  of 
ownership.  We  have  now  to  face  the  query  as  to 
whether  a  church  can  make  as  good  use  of  material 
properties  as  can  an  individual.  Theoretically  at  least 
the  question  answers  itself.  There  is  no  reason  why  a 
group  of  men  professing  the  ideals  of  Christ  and  work- 
ing in  the  spirit  of  Christ  should  not  produce  as  whole- 
some a  social  result  with  material  goods  as  do  private 
owners  working  with  the  ordinary  purposes  of  business. 


20      CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

If  it  be  objected  that  corporate  ownership  is  impersonal 
we  confront  no  weightier  obstacle  than  if  we  say  that 
the  ownership  of  private  wealth  is  personal.  If  by  im- 
personal we  mean  cold-bloodedness  and  heartlessness  we 
have  indeed  a  deplorable  outcome.  But  if  we  mean  im- 
partiality and  regard  for  the  good  of  the  whole  we  have 
an  altogether  different  result, — one  which  may  involve 
much  for  the  welfare  of  Society.  If  by  personal  we 
mean  anxious  concern  rightly  to  discharge  personal  ob- 
ligation we  have  one  result.  But  we  might  just  as  well 
argue  that  the  personal  element  in  mastery  of  wealth 
leads  to  whim  and  caprice  and  partiality  as  to  argue 
that  impersonal  method  in  corporate  business  leads  to 
inhumanity. 

The  upshot  of  it  all  is  that  in  the  use  of  the  funds 
which  are  to  come  into  its  possession  the  Church  is  to  be 
judged  by  the  same  principles  by  which  all  holders  of 
wealth  in  a  rational  society  should  be  rewarded  or  con- 
demned. What  is  to  be  the  outcome  stated  humanly  and 
socially?  This  one  standard  will  sooner  or  later  be 
practically  universal  in  Christendom.  Inasmuch  as  the 
purpose  of  the  Church  is  professedly  to  bring  men  to  the 
stature  of  manhood  in  Christ  there  cannot  be  the  slight- 
est objection  to  putting  the  test  as  severely  to  the 
Church  as  to  any  other  possessors  of  property  rights. 

A  second  objection  against  the  lodging  of  wealth  in 
the  strong  boxes  of  the  organized  church  is  voiced  by  the 
man  who  feels  that  thereby  the  sovereignty  of  the  State 
is  somehow  threatened.  There  is  some  force  in  the  ob- 
jection, though  not  always  of  the  sort  that  the  objector 
may  have  in  mind.  If  the  State  is  the  tool  and  organ  of 
economic  interests  working  for  their  own  purposes  the 
appearance  of  a  great  Church  with  immense  monies  of 


THE  CHURCH  AS  OWNER  21 

its  own  does  bring  into  the  field  a  dangerous  rival, — 
assuming  that  the  Church  itself  is  not  likewise  a  mere 
tool  of  the  backlying  economic  powers.  This  to  one  side 
however, — a  glance  at  the  course  of  history  reveals  that 
the  Church  has  indeed  been  a  dangerous  competitor  of 
the  State  when  the  Church  has  had  too  powerful  control 
of  earthly  goods.  It  would  be  possible  to  make  quite  a 
showing  for  the  thesis  that  the  Protestant  Reformation 
was  an  attempt  by  the  State  to  tear  loose  from  a  Church 
control  which  rooted  in  mastery  of  economic  resources. 
If  we  look  to-day  through  some  countries  in  which  a  move- 
ment like  the  Reformation  has  never  worked  itself  out, 
we  see  that  substantially  a  similar  motive  is  at  work, — 
namely  to  free  the  State  from  an  institution  whose 
power  is  feared  because  of  its  control  of  the  well-filled 
purse.  It  is  not  the  fashion  nowadays  to  turn  to  Mexico 
for  many  political  lessons.  But  the  career  of  our  south- 
ern neighbor  for  many  years  illustrates  the  resentment 
of  States  at  all  self-conscious  against  too  great  financial 
resources  in  ecclesiastical  coffers.  The  moment,  though, 
that  the  Church  has  been  taught  its  fitting  place  by  an 
anti-Church  social  movement  and  devotes  itself  to 
spiritual  exercises,  that  moment  the  State  opposition  is 
likely  to  cease.  What  States  object  to  is  not  the  pos- 
session of  wealth  by  the  Church  but  the  use  of  money, 
or  of  the  influence  or  prestige  which  the  money  brings, 
to  influence  the  current  of  political  events.  It  is  often 
said  that  the  Roman  Catholic  Church  to-day  is  as  much 
of  a  property  holder  as  the  Standard  Oil  Company. 
Two  obstacles  prevent  our  knowing  whether  this  is  just 
or  not:  first  we  do  not  know  how  much  the  Roman 
Catholic  Church  owns,  and  second,  we  do  not  know  tow 
much  the  Standard  Oil  Company  owns.    Whatever  the 


22      CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

holdings  of  the  Roman  Catholic  Church  however,  the 
plain  citizen  of  the  ordinary  State  on  whose  vote  every- 
thing finally  depends  is  not  overmuch  concerned  so  long 
as  the  weight  of  the  immense  financial  resource  is  not 
thrown  into  the  political  scale. 

Has  a  Church,  then,  no  right  to  express  itself  on  a 
political  issue?  The  Church  certainly  has  such  a  right 
so  long  as  it  confines  itself  to  open  and  aboveboard  pro- 
cedure in  the  light  of  noonday.  There  can  be  slight 
moral  justification,  however,  for  any  reliance  upon  ma- 
terial possessions  to  influence  a  political  result.  Of 
course  it  would  be  unthinkable  that  a  Church  would  out 
of  its  treasury  make  appropriations  in  an  ordinary  po- 
litical campaign.  In  a  campaign  having  to  do  with  ex- 
traordinary moral  issues  the  Church  might  feel  the  neces- 
sity  of  making  its  physical  resources  count  on  one  side 
or  the  other.  Even  in  such  case  citizens  of  the  State 
have  cause  to  complain  if  a  single  penny  is  spent  in  a 
way  that  the  public  does  not  understand.  There  is  no 
institution  on  earth  more  under  obligation  to  throw  its 
financial  books  open  to  the  world  than  is  the  Church. 
The  Church  method  at  every  crisis  at  all  political  should 
be  one  of  persuasion  in  the  name  of  the  supreme  Chris- 
tian ideals.  If  any  financial  influence  beyond  this  is  to 
count  a  feather's  weight,  the  world  is  entitled  to  all  the 
facts. 

The  danger  in  these  days  is  not  so  much  that  the  re- 
sources which  are  sure  to  come  to  the  Church  wiU  count 
against  the  State  as  that  they  will  count  too  much  in 
favor  of  the  State.  We  would  not  deny  the  right  of  the 
Church  in  a  grave  national  crisis  to  cast  all  its  legitimate 
influence  to  the  cause  which  it  deems  to  be  just.  It  was 
through  the  agencies  of  organized  Christianity  that  im- 


THE  CHURCH  AS  OWNER  23 

mense  volumes  of  material  support  came  to  the  Allies 
against  the  Central  Powers.  I  was  ardently  desirous  of 
seeing  the  will  of  the  Allies  made  to  prevail,  so  that 
there  is  no  lurking  taint  of  pro-germanism  in  my  expres- 
sion of  the  hope  that  such  official  Church  operations  will 
never  again  have  to  be  so  definitely  subordinated  to  a 
state  policy.  The  Church  is  to  stand  for  transcendent 
ideals.  It  must  so  conduct  itself  as  to  be  always  free  to 
proclaim  those  ideals  no  matter  what  the  policy  of  the 
State  may  be.  For  the  next  twenty-five  or  fifty  years 
the  peril  to  Society  may  be  not  that  Church  and  vState 
are  hostile  to  each  other,  but  that  they  are  too  friendly. 
We  mean  by  this  that  the  only  earthly  power  that  will 
save  civilization  from  recurrence  of  a  horrible  catastrophe 
like  that  of  the  past  half-dozen  years  will  be  one  that 
bears  aloft  the  torch  of  the  social  and  international  ideals 
of  Christianity:  and  that  if  the  Church  is  to  do  this  it 
must  be  so  free  from  the  State  as  not  to  be  tempted  to 
bedim  its  ideals  by  compromise. 

A  third  objector  against  the  growing  financial  power 
of  the  Church  has  much  to  say  about  the  physical  goods 
of  this  earth  belonging  to  all  men  in  common.  He  can- 
not see  why  a  Church  is  allowed  to  enclose  lands  which 
should  be  open  to  everybody  and  to  crowd  those  lands 
with  buildings  which  are  opened  only  once  or  twice  a 
week.  If  this  were  all  of  the  objection  we  could  meet  it 
by  pointing  out  that  many  churches  to-day  are  open  all 
the  time  and  that  we  are  proclaiming  that  wherever  pos- 
sible the  Church  should  serve  twenty-four  hours  out  of 
every  twenty-four.  There  is,  however,  back  of  the  ob- 
jection a  vague  and  haz}^  notion  of  what  is  good  for  So- 
ciety. In  discussing  the  foundations  of  private  prop- 
erty we  said  that  Society  had  established  these  rights 


24      CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

for  the  worth  of  the  social  outcome.  We  must  urge 
that  Society  is  not  just  a  big  number  of  persons,  any  one 
of  whom  has  a  right  to  feel  aggrieved  when  he  sees  ag- 
gregations of  property  devoted  to  purposes  of  which 
he  does  not  personally  approve.  Society  is,  indeed,  the 
sum  of  all  the  individuals  that  compose  it.  But  these 
individuals  live  in  organic  relations  to  groups  to  which 
they  belong.  Among  these  groups  is  the  Church.  Not 
only  does  a  man  become  a  new  creature  when  he  enters 
the  Kingdom  of  God  but  he  becomes  a  new  creature  when 
he  joins  the  Church.  That  is  to  say,  he  enters  into  a 
net-work  of  relationships  to  his  fellowmen  which  draw 
out  of  him  powers  to  which  he  never  could  have  attained 
as  an  unrelated  individual. 

This  grouping  instinct  is  one  of  the  outstanding  facts 
in  human  history.  In  the  form  of  the  Middle  Age  Guilds 
it  was  the  most  significant  factor  during  hundreds  of 
years  of  European  life.  Socially  worthy  organizations 
have  claims  as  sacred  as  those  of  individual  persons,  and 
these  claims  have  the  same  foundation  as  other  social 
rights, — namely  they  are  granted  because  of  the  benefi- 
cial social  consequences.  Every  now  and  again  some 
radical  whose  knowledge  of  social  processes  is  not  as  ex- 
tensive as  his  zeal  shouts  out  for  the  confiscation  of  the 
property  of  age-old  institutions.  He  does  not  under- 
stand that  these  properties  are  not  just  so  many  heaps 
of  material  stuffs  which  could  be  divided  equally  among 
the  confiscators.  To  tear  away  the  material  possessions 
of  many  an  organization  serving  a  good  social  end  would 
be  not  to  distribute  coins  among  the  multitude,  but  to 
destroy  living  organisms  which  minister  to  Society  it- 
self. 

To  appropriate  an  illustration  from  a  secular  field  we 


THE  CHURCH  AS  OWNER  25 

may  remind  ourselves  that  there  is  in  the  United  States 
a  fund  granted  out  of  the  estate  of  a  multi-millionaire 
for  the  most  thoroughly  scientific  investigation  of  the 
causes  of  diseases.  It  would  be  possible  for  a  social 
enthusiast  to  excite  himself  desperately  over  the  pro- 
cesses by  which  in  other  days  the  money  which  now  pays 
for  the  scientific  inquiries,  was  heaped  up.  He  might 
even  persuade  a  body  of  followers  that  the  only  fair 
course  would  be  to  confiscate  the  fund  and  distribute  it 
among  the  people.  Assuming  that  he  succeeded  in  do- 
ing this,  however.  Society  would  soon  be  compelled  to 
vote  grants  continuing  scientific  investigation  precisely 
similar  to  that  now  being  subsidized  by  the  fund,  and 
to  make  the  grants  in  such  fashion  as  to  keep  alive  the 
most  vital  feature  of  the  scientific  organization,  the 
esprit  du  corps  of  the  investigators.  Much  social 
criticism  fails  to  see  that  even  sums  of  money  become 
integral  parts  of  the  social  organisms  which  are  living 
entities.  Here  again  the  test  is  as  to  the  social  con- 
sequences. We  can  only  appeal  to  the  ideal  of  the 
Church  and  say  that  the  Church  can  manifestly  work 
with  a  more  wholesome  social  result  if  it  can  have  the 
benefit  of  whatever  will  increase  its  group  consciousness 
and  group  effectiveness.  What  the  Church  will  with- 
draw from  the  pockets  of  Society  will  not  likely  be  too 
much  if  the  money  truly  adds  to  the  efficacy  of  an  or- 
ganization preaching  the  ideals  of  Jesus.  All  comes 
back,  however,  to  the  worth  of  the  human  product,  to 
which  we  must  hold  steadily.  The  quasi-personality  of 
the  group  is  sacred  only  as  it  serves  a  sacred  purpose. 
Business  corporations  organized  for  utterly  selfish  pur- 
poses are  forms  of  group  activity.  Political  parties  are 
social  organisms.     If  Society  cannot  redeem  financial,  or 


26      CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

political  or  any  other  group  activities  set  on  selfish  or 
unsocial  aims  it  has  a  right  to  reduce  them  to  impotence. 
And  this  opens  the  door  to  a  final  objection,  which  is 
that  the  grant  of  property  to  Church  organizations  en- 
courages the  growth  of  the  delusion  of  a  super-organiza- 
tion above  and  beyond  the  people  composing  the  or- 
ganization. We  are  reminded  that  this  was  that  inner 
vice  of  Prussianism  which  plunged  the  whole  world  into 
war.  The  sin  of  Prussianism,  however,  was  not  so  much 
in  the  erection  of  a  super-State  before  the  mind  of  Ger- 
many, as  in  the  character  of  that  super-State.  The  ideal 
beneath  which  the  individual  was  to  be  as  naught  was 
that  of  brute  might  hacking  its  way  through  to  universal 
victory.  The  Church  has  an  ideal  which  indeed  reaches 
out  beyond  the  members  actually  composing  the  Church 
at  any  one  instant.  The  ideal  is  of  a  communion  of  the 
saints  which  includes  not  merely  those  striving  after 
righteousness  here  and  now,  but  also  those  who  have 
struggled  and  passed  on,  and  those  who  are  to  come  here- 
after. It  stands  for  a  picture  of  human  life  yet  to  be 
realized, — a  social  body  of  Christ,  a  righteous  humanity 
whose  members  are  as  closely  correlated  as  the  organs  of 
the  human  body.  The  dream  may  never  be  materialized 
on  earth.  From  this  point  of  view  the  Church  does 
stand  for  a  super-body  or  for  a  super-thing  beyond  any- 
thing here  and  now.  Is  it  not  worth  while  to  have  an 
organism  witnessing  to  the  belief  in  such  a  hope?  Can 
there  be  anj^hing  more  beneficial  for  Society  as  a  whole 
than  to  have  such  a  conception  floating,  not  as  a  cloud 
castle  before  the  far-seeing  gaze  of  poets  and  seers,  but 
as  a  working  plan  to  guide  the  efforts  of  men  and  women 
and  children  in  the  daily  task  ?    Is  there  any  more  noble 


THE  CHURCH  AS  OWNER  27 

goal  than  this  toward  which  the  golden  streams  of  earth 's 
physical  resources  could  be  turned? 

And  yet  we  must  not  miss  the  force  of  the  objection. 
If  the  Church  is  to  receive  increasing  control  over  the 
things  of  earth  it  must  arrive  at  that  habit  of  mind  which 
surely  discriminates  between  the  temporal  and  the 
eternal,  and  between  the  instrumental  and  the  end-in- 
itself.  Money  is  an  instrument.  It  would  be  easily  pos- 
sible, however,  for  the  accumulation  of  material  goods  to 
become  an  ecclesiastical  end-in-itself.  We  have  beheld 
altogether  too  much  of  such  a  tendency  in  the  history  of 
the  Church.  The  ends-in-themselves  in  the  Church  are 
the  lives  that  compose  the  Church,  as  those  lives  move 
on  toward  the  progressive  incarnation  of  the  Christian 
ideals.  The  instruments  in  the  Church  are  creeds  and 
rituals  and  organizational  contrivances.  They  are  tools, 
or  organs,  to  aid  in  the  development  of  life.  But  how 
often  have  we  seen  the  relation  reversed  and  the  creedal 
formula,  for  example,  placed  in  foremost  importance? 
An  organizational  scheme  is  nothing  but  a  device  for 
human  and  spiritual  uplift,  but  how  often  have  we  seen 
organizations,  as  such,  exalted  for  almost  worshipful 
honor.  So  it  might  be  possible  for  a  Church,  especially 
in  a  commercial  epoch,  to  make  the  possession  of  material 
goods  of  more  importance  than  the  welfare  of  human 
beings.  This  possibility  must  always  prevent  us  from 
turning  hastily  away  from  those  who  protest  against 
property-holding  by  the  Church  because  of  the  likeli- 
hood of  property  to  be  erected  into  an  end-in-itself. 

We  repeat  that  ethical  title  to  ownership  implies  an 
ability  to  make  the  most  of  the  material  owned.  In  later 
chapters  we  shall  examine  some  of  the  standards  by 


28      CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

which  the  Church  must  judge  its  expenditures.  We  may 
anticipate  by  saying  that  the  obligation  upon  the  Church 
is  simply  to  use  money  as  a  key  to  unlock  the  higher 
treasures.  We  say  of  money  as  a  mechanism  of  ex- 
change that  its  value  consists  not  in  anything  in  itself 
but  in  its  power  to  travel  from  hand  to  hand  and  from 
pocket  to  pocket,  figuratively  transmuting  itself  into  the 
foods  on  which  men  can  subsist,  or  delivering  the  tools 
with  which  they  can  labor.  It  is  the  business  of  the 
Church  so  to  utilize  all  its  material  possessions  as  to 
unlock  for  men  the  doors  to  the  finer  riches. 

What  those  riches  are  the  Church  will  itself  have  to 
be,  in  the  first  instance,  the  judge.  The  outside  indi- 
viduals and  groups  and  Society  itself  cannot  prescribe 
for  the  Church  beforehand  what  to  seek  for  with  its 
resources.  The  State  and  Society  can  indeed  lay  down 
laws  and  establish  customs  within  which  the  Church 
must  move,  but  the  Church  itself,  as  a  body  of  persons 
looking  toward  the  highest  spiritual  ideals,  will  be  ex- 
pected to  announce  the  content  of  those  ideals  and  the 
method  by  which  they  are  to  be  reached.  If  the 
Church,  however,  has  this  initiative,  this  first  word — 
the  general  public  opinion  of  Society  will  have  the  last 
word.  The  results  of  Church  activities  will  in  the  end 
have  to  be  such  as  commend  themselves  to  the  public 
mind  and  conscience.  And  this  ought  not  to  be  an  im- 
possible achievement.  Enlarging  and  improving  life 
has  a  power  of  rendering  itself  intelligible  to  the  dullest 
understanding.  Deeds  of  kindness  and  helpfulness 
need  no  interpreter.  There  may  be  unfathomable  depths 
in  religious  truth,  and  the  ideal  in  Christ  may  forever 
march  beyond  our  arm's  length,  but  what  truth  we  get 
bears  witness  to  itself,  and  what  measure  of  the  ideal  we 


THE  CHURCH  AS  OWNER  29 

attain  has  spontaneous  attractiveness.  By  its  fruits  the 
Church  is  to  be  known.  The  people  who  have  to  eat  the 
fruit  will  be  the  best  judges  as  to  its  quality.  It  will 
not  do  for  the  Church  to  declare  that  the  Christian 
ideal  is  in  its  keeping  and  that  it  cares  not  whether  men 
outside  give  heed,  since  it  is  the  authority  in  its  own 
sphere.  The  loftiest  ideal  must  at  last  cast  the  farthest 
reaching  shadow  on  the  ground ;  and  by  the  social  healing 
in  that  shadow  will  the  justice  of  the  claim  of  the  Church 
to  an  increasing  share  of  this  world's  goods  be  judged. 
There  is  no  divine  right  to  property  apart  from  a  divine 
resolve  in  using  property  to  make  men  more  open  to  the 
divine.  We  move  here  in  a  realm  altogether  apart  from 
the  narrow  legal  and  conventionally  commercial.  The  re- 
sources of  the  Church  belong  to  the  Lord  in  that  they 
are  to  be  wholly  devoted  to  the  cause  of  the  divine 
Kingdom.  If  they  are  not  so  devoted  they  lack  social 
justification — and  apart  from  social  worth  they  cannot 
be  soundly  defended  by  abstract  legality  or  appeals  to 
divine  sanction. 


CHAPTER  III 

THE   CHUKCH   AS  SOLICITOR 

The  problem  of  the  Church  as  solicitor  at  first  glance 
seems  to  be  no  problem  at  all.  All  the  Church  has  to 
do  is  to  put  before  its  members  the  recital  of  the  needs 
and  then  to  reenforce  this  with  the  spiritual  appeal. 
The  Church  professedly  exists  for  the  realization  of  the 
finer  possibilities  of  mankind.  The  showing  of  the 
money  requirements  necessary  ought  to  be  the  only  re- 
quisite for  inciting  Christians  to  adequate  response. 
Readers  of  the  New  Testament  recall  that  Paul  fre- 
quently asked  for  financial  aid  for  Christian  causes, — 
that  he  simply  mentioned  the  needs  and  based  the  claim 
on  the  accepted  thought  of  the  spirit  of  Christianity. 
*' Remember  the  poor  saints  at  Jerusalem,"  he  would 
say,  ''And  then  remember  also  Christ  Jesus  who  though 
he  was  rich  yet  for  your  sakes  became  poor,  that  ye 
through  his  poverty  might  become  rich."  There  could 
not  be  a  more  dignified  call  for  money  or  one  more  de- 
serving of  substantial  return. 

Unfortunately,  in  this  tough-grained  and  twisted 
world,  it  is  not  always  possible  to  attain  the  Pauline 
standard.  One  of  the  armor  joints  at  which  the  Church 
is  most  often  assailed  is  its  dependence  upon  financial 
contributions,  and  the  real  though  often  unconscious 
dependence  also  upon  those  who  make  the  contributions. 
Even  if  all  the  constituency  of  a  Church  were  at  the  top- 
most peak  of  consecration  many  of  the  consecrated  would 

30 


THE  CHURCH  AS  SOLICITOR  31 

have  their  own  notions  as  to  how  Church  money  should 
be  spent,  and  these  notions  might  not  be  of  the  sanest. 
Actually  the  money  of  the  Church  comes  from  a  con- 
stituency not  wholly  sanctified  and  some  of  the  con- 
tributors are  outside  the  Church.  It  is  possible,  then,  to 
press  the  charge  that  the  exigencies  of  the  Church  make 
it  necessary  for  it  to  adopt  an  attitude  of  virtual  com- 
promise toward  rich  givers.  It  would  be  almost  impos- 
sible to-day  to  listen  to  a  speech  of  any  length  directed 
against  the  Church  without  hearing  this  criticism  that 
the  Church  sells  its  birthright  by  its  acceptance  of  the 
gifts  of  the  rich.  Because  of  this  dependence  upon 
money  contributions  the  Church  is  often  condemned  for 
having  the  class  consciousness  of  the  well-to-do. 

Twenty-five  years  ago  quite  a  notable  debate  raged 
over  the  propriety  of  a  Church  organization's  accepting 
** tainted  money."  When  the  revelations  as  to  the  prac- 
tices of  some  of  the  great  corporations  first  came  to  light 
the  spontaneous  feeling  of  any  strictly  ethical  conscious- 
ness was  that  money  gained  by  such  processes  was 
tainted,  to  say  the  least.  We  must  not  disparage  those 
who  took  this  stand.  Men  like  Washington  Gladden 
rendered  a  public  service  in  calling  attention  to  the 
impropriety  in  a  Church's  accepting,  without  a  word,  a 
share  in  ill-gotten  gains.  Much  criticism  was  heaped 
upon  Gladden  and  his  followers,  some  churchmen  avow- 
ing that  the  scruple  was  absurd  and  even  silly.  We 
were  gravely  informed  that  money  in  itself  cannot  be 
tainted,  that  any  money  to  which  a  man  has  a  legal  right 
ought  to  be  freely  accepted  by  a  Church,  that  to  say 
otherwise  is  pharisaism;  all  of  which  now  seems  quite 
beside  the  mark.  The  Gl-adden  group  were  speaking  out 
of  an  awakening  social  consciousness.  They  were  pion- 
eers in  a  new  field,  trying  to  guard  the  Church  and  So- 


32      CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

ciety  from  the  evil  effects  of  alliance  with  anti-social 
forces.  They  are  entitled  to  unstinted  credit  for  their 
note  of  warning,  though  the  problem  would  not  be  put 
to-day  just  as  they  stated  it  twenty-five  years  ago.  If 
the  money  was  indeed  tainted  the  best  way  to  remove  its 
taint  was  to  devote  it  to  a  good  cause — return  to  those 
wronged  being  out  of  the  question — though  such  a  course 
would  not  remove  the  taint  of  the  giver  of  the  money, 
especially  if  he  kept  on  supplying  taint. 

The  pertinent  consideration,  however, — in  spite  of  the 
dictum  that  guilt  is  always  personal — is  that  the  faults 
of  a  corporation  are  likely  to  be  faults  of  men  not  as 
individuals  but  as  groups.  The  charge  should  lie  against 
bad  group  ethics, — this  regardless  of  whether  the  group 
is  big  or  little.  Too  many  corporations  practice  only  on 
a  world  scale  what  too  many  smaller  firms  are  doing  on 
a  village  scale.  The  best  way  to  attack  such  a  problem 
is  not  by  refusing  gifts  from  one  supposedly  outstanding 
personal  offender  in  a  spirit  of  inquisition  into  individual 
consciences,  but  by  effort  to  improve  group  morality. 
This  is  most  desperately  imperative.  Many  a  person- 
ally upright  business  man  is  helpless  in  the  clutch  of  a 
machine  which  he  alone  cannot  improve.  When  we 
speak  of  the  Church  as  itself  an  investor  we  shall  in- 
dicate some  ways  in  which  it  is  possible  for  Christian 
conscience  to  favor  concerns  which  are  acting  according 
to  the  best  social  light  available, — possible  too  without 
laying  the  Church  open  to  the  charge  of  inquisitional 
fussiness.  Wlien  the  Church  seeks  the  worthiest  cor- 
porations with  which  to  invest  its  money  it  is  free  from 
the  charge  of  not  attending  to  its  own  business,  since 
the  Church's  investment  of  its  own  money  is  strictly  its 
own  business. 


THE  CHURCH  AS  SOLICITOR  33 

The  moment  we  begin  to  talk  about  the  evils  of  sys- 
tems we  are  halted  by  those  who  will  have  it  that  the 
Church  is  wrong  in  accepting  any  money  from  rich  men 
at  all.  All  the  rich  are  lumped  together  in  one  category 
as  parts  of  a  system  which  is  altogether  evil.  But  this, 
we  repeat,  is  hasty,  to  say  the  least.  Many  are  doing  the 
best  they  can  in  an  order  which  they  would  be  glad  to 
make  better.  And  under  any  system  some  men  will  have 
more  than  others ;  and  ' '  riches  "  is  a  relative  term.  After 
Society  has  rooted  out  all  the  artificial  inequalities  there 
are  some  inherent  and  natural  differences  which  cannot  be 
escaped.  Among  them  the  inequality  that  comes  from  the 
ability  of  some  men  under  any  conditions  to  get  more 
money  than  others  by  the  superior  worth  of  the  service 
they  render,  and  by  their  ability  to  hold  fast  to  what 
they  have  earned.  Suppose  we  strip  from  individuals 
all  riches  that  descend  by  inheritance,  or  all  that  pile  up 
from  anything  like  an  unearned  increment.  Suppose 
we  decree  that  no  man  shall  have  a  cent  of  economic  rent, 
or  of  interest,  or  of  profits  for  which  he  has  not  labored. 
Unless  we  go  on  then  to  laws  which  would  at  least  at 
present  stamp  out  all  initiative  whatsoever,  we  would 
find  that  at  the  end  of  ten  years,  or  even  at  the  end  of 
five,  some  men  in  the  community  would  have  in  their 
possession  manifold  more  than  other  men,  and  every 
cent  of  their  resources  might  have  come  out  of  a  service 
rendered  the  community.  It  may  be  that  the  possession 
of  immense  wealth  under  the  present  industrial  order 
argues  that  the  owners  have  received  a  reward  beyond 
anything  they  could  legitimately  have  earned.  But 
even  under  the  present  scheme  we  cannot  pour  unspar- 
ing condemnation  on  the  man  who  has  fairly  played  the 
game  according  to  the  rules  which  now  obtain.     Some 


34       CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

day  we  may  change  the  rules,  or  we  may  even  do  away 
with  the  game  altogether.  But  as  long  as  the  game  is 
played  according  to  the  rules  established  by  Society's 
sanction,  undiscriminating  condemnation  of  the  rich  be- 
cause they  are  rich  is  unreasonable  and  unwarranted. 

Passing  now  from  the  notion  of  tainted  money  and  of 
wickedness  inherent  in  wealth  as  such,  what  are  the 
perils  which  confront  the  Church  as  a  Solicitor  of  funds 
in  a  day  when  the  funds  are  sought  in  such  huge 
amounts?  It  will  be  understood  that  we  are  writing 
this  essay  after  some  opportunity  for  observation  of 
facts.  We  may  say  then  that  the  danger  is  not  pri- 
marily that  rich  men  will  seek  to  control  the  Church. 
If  we  take  any  list  of  prominent  preachers  in  any  gen- 
eration we  find  that  probably  all  of  them  have  at  various 
times  served  congregations  composed  at  least  in  part  of 
wealthy  pew-holders.  Probably  all  the  bolder  speaking 
prophets  in  the  pulpit  through  any  stretch  of  years 
would  testify  that  the  number  of  attempts  at  direct  con- 
trol of  their  speech  had  been  small.  To  more  of  an  ex- 
tent than  we  may  imagine  even  the  wealthy  pew-holders 
expect  a  measure  of  boldness  in  pulpit  utterance.  While 
we  have  not  data  at  hand  to  verify  our  conclusion  we 
are  of  the  opinion  that  there  is  less  attempt  at  direct 
control  of  the  preacher's  utterance  by  rich  contributors 
than  there  is  of  control  of  newspaper,  for  example,  by 
rich  advertisers,  or  of  the  politicians'  speeches  by  heavy 
givers  to  the  campaign  fund.  We  may  legitimately  im- 
agine that  after  some  sermons  the  rich  listener  thinks 
very  emphatically  and  that  he  may  even  speak  out  with 
considerable  force,  but  he  does  not  often  directly  pro- 
ceed to  official  action  against  the  preacher. 

Just  as  the  attempts  at  direct  control  of  pulpit  utter- 


THE  CHURCH  AS  SOLICITOR  35 

ance  have  been  comparatively  few,  so  also  the  attempts 
to  interfere  with  the  utterance  in  the  educational  institu- 
tions of  the  churches  have  been  few,  or  were  few  until 
the  Great  War  for  the  time  being  tore  us  loose  from  all 
our  accustomed  fastenings.  The  outrages  upon  free 
speech  perpetrated  in  the  past  few  months  must  be 
diagnosed  as  wholly  abnormal.  We  have  confidence 
enough  in  the  mass  of  the  people  to  believe  that  these 
lapses  into  bigotry  and  intolerance  and  social  lunacy  will 
pass  as  the  war  fever  cools  do-vvn. 

What  is,  then,  the  danger  that  confronts  the  Church 
in  raising  money?  One  danger  is  in  the  phrasings  of 
appeal  shaped  to  render  them  convincing  to  wealthy 
contributors.  The  test  of  the  success  of  such  appeals  is 
the  amount  of  money  that  flows  into  the  coifers  of  the 
Church  in  response.  It  could  hardly  be  expected  that  a 
call  for  funds  for  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven  which  glows 
with  much  heat  on  the  manifest  inadequacies  of  the  pres- 
ent industrial  order  would  get  a  lavish  welcome  from 
the  upholders  of  that  order.  We  might  indeed  hear  no 
violent  invective  against  the  appeal  but  the  list  of  sub- 
scribers would  not  be  long.  Again,  successful  soliciting 
for  funds  depends  upon  a  quality  of  mind  and  ability  in 
the  solicitor  which  does  not  tend  toward  the  most  rugged 
and  uncompromising  fearlessness  of  utterance.  What- 
ever truth  there  is  in  the  charge  that  the  Church  has 
the  class  consciousness  of  the  man  of  wealth  probably 
arises  out  of  the  fact  that  so  many  leaders  of  church 
enterprises  at  one  time  and  another  have  to  devote  so 
large  a  share  of  their  time  to  interviews  with  well-to-do 
potential  contributors.  Making  every  allowance  for  the 
personal  integrity  of  such  solicitors  they  must  be  rare 
souls  indeed  if  they  successfully  withstand  the  temjJta- 


36       CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

tions  which,  come  from  long  continued  personal  associa- 
tion with  the  possessing  classes. 

There  are  pleasant  incidents  connected  with  enter- 
tainment by  a  rich  man  which  at  least  get  the  nose  under 
the  tent  for  the  camel  of  the  rich  man 's  social  philosophy. 
Wealth  surrounds  itself  with  some  charms  of  taste  and 
refinement  which  are  often  more  appreciated  by  the 
solicitor  of  the  contribution  than  by  the  contributor  him- 
self. The  solicitor  must  be  a  patient  listener;  he  will 
hear  repeated  expositions  of  the  superiority  of  the  pres- 
ent social  order  as  over  against  any  other  social  order 
that  the  world  has  ever  known.  Very  few  rich  defenders 
of  the  order  moreover  are  quite  so  blunt  as  to  say  that 
they  believe  in  the  order  just  because  of  its  material 
productiveness.  They  see  in  it  rather  the  foundation  of 
law  and  the  buttress  of  family  life  and  the  bulwark  of 
religion.  If  the  upholder  of  the  present  industrial  sys- 
tem takes  an  interest  in  theology  at  all  he  is  likely  to  be 
altogether  orthodox.  He  is  impressed  by  a  Christianity 
which  lays  stress  on  authority  and  feels  most  content 
when  he  hears  that  the  authority  roots  in  an  infallible 
Book  or  an  infallible  Church.  Unless  the  solicitor  is 
extraordinarily  self-controlled  he  emerges  from  a  few 
years  of  successful  solicitation  of  funds  from  rich  men 
thoroughly  imbued  with  the  class  consciousness  of  the 
well-to-do.  It  was  this  possibility  which  years  ago  led 
Robert  Smillie,  the  greatest  English  labor  leader  of  our 
day,  to  say  that  he  would  never  '' accept  invitations" 
from  the  rich.  A  well  known  ecclesiastical  educator  in 
this  country  was  for  years  most  successful  in  securing 
financial  aid  for  his  university  from  the  leaders  of  a 
mighty  corporation  almost  constantly  under  fire  of 
criticism.     The  defense  of  the  corporation  methods  by 


THE  CHURCH  AS  SOLICITOR  37 

the  ecclesiastical  leader  was  so  whole-hearted  as  to  lend 
color  to  the  charge  that  he  was  advocating  practices 
which  the  leaders  of  the  corporation  themselves  had 
abandoned  years  before  because  they  were  convinced, 
they  said,  that  such  methods  were  socially  harmful! 
Even  such  solicitors,  however,  with  such  a  class  con- 
sciousness seldom  break  out  in  frontal  assault  against 
those  who  feel  it  to  be  the  function  of  the  Church  to 
warn  of  current  social  perils.  They  confess  to  an  im- 
patience with  the  impatience  of  their  radical  brethren. 
They  regret  that  the  critics  do  not  have  more  tact,  and 
advise  that  zeal  be  tempered  with  judgment.  They  also 
insist  that  utterances  should  be  timely, — by  which  they 
usually  mean  the  lapse  of  a  safe  period  after  there  is 
reason  for  saying  anything.  Or  they  are  like  an  ec- 
clesiastical editor  to  whom  Borden  P.  Bowne,  at  the  time 
the  foremost  thinker  in  American  Methodism,  once  sub- 
mitted a  manuscript  for  publication.  The  editor  agreed 
that  everything  in  the  manuscript  was  true  but  he  re- 
gretted that  the  writer  had  not  stated  the  truth  in  such 
fashion  as  not  to  attract  notice. 

It  is  in  such  directions  that  the  peril  of  the  Church  as 
a  solicitor  of  funds  must  be  sought.  The  danger  of  at- 
tempt at  direct  control  is  slight.  The  masses  of  the 
Church  would  resent  such  control.  The  risk  is  that  he 
who  has  dealing  with  rich  contributors  for  much  of  his 
task,  with  rare  exceptions  will  arrive  at  the  point  of 
view  of  the  contributor.  Any  man  who  has  been  in  the 
ministry  for  a  quarter  of  a  century  can  recall  preachers 
who  began  their  careers  by  being  prophets  of  God  and 
ended  by  being  chaplains  of  the  well-to-do, — chaplains, 
too,  very  deft  in  pulling  the  sting  from  the  piercing 
phrases  of  the  Gospel.     One  such  solicitor  once  rebuked 


38       CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

a  subordinate  official  who  was  protesting  against  having 
to  sit  silent  before  a  prospective  giver's  oracular  pro- 
nouncements in  defense  of  all  details  of  the  capitalistic 
system  by  saying:  *'It  is  your  business  to  convert  dol- 
lars as  well  as  to  convert  men/'  The  reply  seems  quite 
final  until  we  begin  to  think  it  over.  We  do  not  always 
begin  to  convert  men  by  telling  them  what  fine  fellows 
they  are.  Souls  are  not  often  flattered  and  tickled  into 
the  Kingdom  of  Heaven.  Conversion  implies  a  convic- 
tion for  sin  and  the  desire  to  forsake  sin  and  to  lead  a 
new  life  following  the  commandment  of  God.  If  the 
conversion  of  dollars  were  occasionally  sought  by  arous- 
ing similar  spiritual  stirrings  we  might  well  rejoice  in 
such  conversions  as  gleams  of  the  dawn  of  a  new  day. 
But  not  many  dollars  are  converted  by  just  such  pro- 
cesses. 

Still  there  are  solicitors  who  bring  money  to  the  King- 
dom of  God  in  thoroughly  ethical  ways.  Moreover,  lest 
we  seem  to  have  left  the  rich  men  in  a  bad  light,  we  may 
say  also  that  in  the  United  States  increasing  numbers  of 
rich  men  can  be  found  who  will  contribute  money  to 
causes  led  by  men  in  whom  they  indeed  have  confidence 
but  in  whose  methods  or  views  they  may  not  altogether 
believe.  There  are  in  our  country  educational  institu- 
tions controlled  by  boards  of  trustees  who  will  not  think 
of  interfering  with  the  instruction  of  the  institution  so 
long  as  they  believe  in  the  ability  and  integrity  of  the 
instructors,  and  who  will  heartily  reelect  such  teachers 
for  terms  of  years.  It  is  more  and  more  the  case  that — 
wretched  events  of  the  last  year  or  two  apart — holders 
of  financial  power  will  support  radical  utterances  in 
which  they  do  not  agree.  A  memorable  instance  oc- 
curred  in    1916   in   the   relation   of   the   late   Willard 


THE  CHURCH  AS  SOLICITOR  39 

Straight  to  the  publication  of  The  New  Republic.  It 
will  be  remembered  that  Mr,  Straight  was  supporting 
this  journal  of  liberal  opinion  with  extensive  pecuniary 
aid  for  what  he  conceived  to  be  the  general  good  of  the 
community.  In  the  presidential  campaign  of  1916  the 
editors  of  The  New  Bepuhlic  decided  to  favor  Mr.  Wilson 
for  the  Presidency.  Mr.  Straight  desired  to  see  Mr. 
Hughes  elected.  Instead  of  forcing  his  own  choice  upon 
the  editors  of  the  journal,  or  of  withdrawing  his  financial 
support,  Mr.  Straight  was  content  to  publish  a  letter 
expressing  his  own  political  views  and  then  to  leave  the 
editors  free  to  follow  their  course.  This  was  tolerance 
worthy  of  the  name, — tolerance  of  a  view  opposed  to 
one's  own  view,  and  that  not  on  an  incidental  trifle,  but 
on  an  issue  of  genuine  importance.  Valuable  as  were 
Mr.  Straight's  many  services  to  his  country  none  was 
more  valuable  than  this  manifestation  of  a  spirit  which 
means  everything  to  a  nation  which  depends  for  its 
social  progress  on  free  discussion. 

We  may  count  upon  public  sentiment  to  encourage 
an  ever  enlarging  spirit  of  generosity  on  the  part  of  the 
well-to-do.  It  requires  only  ordinary  intelligence  to 
recognize  that  the  capitalistic  system  to-day  is  on  trial 
as  never  before.  Abstract  arguments  either  for  or 
against  the  system  are  of  slight  value.  The  effective  de- 
fense will  have  to  be  the  cultivation  of  social  responsibil- 
ity by  the  well-to-do.  It  is  now  the  common  expectation 
in  this  country  that  when  a  holder  of  vast  possessions 
dies  he  shall  leave  a  considerable  share  of  his  holdings 
to  some  agency  devoted  to  social  betterment.  There  is 
general  recognition  that  this  is  the  most  effective  way  to 
keep  the  holdings  intact.  As  we  said  on  a  previous 
page,  even  if  the  extreme  doctrines  of  some  social  radi- 


40      CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

cals  should  be  one  day  adopted  and  all  endowment  funds 
should  be  confiscated  in  the  name  of  the  public  welfare, 
the  community  would  find  that  if  it  was  not  to  suffer 
irreparable  harm  it  would  be  compelled  to  set  aside  out  of 
the  common  treasury  sums  for  the  very  purposes  which 
had  been  served  by  most  of  the  endowments. 

Only  a  short  memory  is  necessary  to  recall  the  day 
when  the  holders  of  property  were  looked  upon  as  en- 
titled to  do  what  they  pleased  with  their  own.  It  is  not 
twenty  years  since  President  Hadley  of  Yale  was  the 
target  of  much  caustic  ridicule  from  some  newspapers 
of  the  country  because  of  his  declaration  that  the  time 
was  approaching  when  public  sentiment  against  the*  ir- 
responsible use  of  wealth  would  become  so  terrific  as  to 
bring  about  the  social  ostracism  of  the  well-to-do  who 
would  not  take  their  social  trusteeship  seriously.  Within 
a  comparatively  few  years  after  President  Hadley 's 
prophecy  an  insurance  investigation  in  New  York  dug 
up  much  startling  evidence  as  to  the  frivolous,  not  to 
say  immoral,  recklessness  of  some  kings  in  the  financial 
world.  No  penalties  were  enacted  by  a  court  after  the 
investigations,  but  within  a  few  months  the  wrongdoers 
had,  most  of  them,  been  eliminated  from  all  possibility 
of  future  wrongdoing  with  a  deadliness  which  was  simply 
tragic.  The  only  executioner  at  work  was  public  opin- 
ion. We  are  not  saying  that  we  rejoice  in  the  temper  of 
the  public  mind  which  puts  compulsion  upon  those  bc' 
queathing  goods  to  grant  portions  of  them  to  social 
enterprises,  but  we  do  say  that  the  public  expectation  is 
what  it  is,  and  that  gifts  for  social  causes  are  more  and 
more  regarded  as  of  the  normal  duty  accompanying  the 
possession  of  wealth.  In  this  consciousness  of  duty 
many    of    the    well-to-do    freely     and    gladly    devote 


THE  CHURCH  AS  SOLICITOR  41 

large  measures  of  their  wealth  to  the  common  good. 

We  have  given  much  of  this  chapter  to  a  phase  of  our 
subject  which  is  after  all  of  secondary  importance.  It 
would  indeed  be  damaging  to  the  Church  if  the  time 
should  ever  come  when  it  would  be  chiefly  dependent 
upon  the  generosity  of  the  well-to-do.  But  with  pros- 
pects of  denominational  union  as  bright  as  they  now 
are,  and  with  present-day  emphasis  on  every-member 
canvasses,  the  funds  of  the  Church  will  not  come  in  chief 
part  from  the  offerings  of  the  more  favored.  Indeed 
they  have  never  thus  come.  The  generosity  of  the  or- 
dinary givers  has  made  possible  the  enterprises  of  the 
Church.  The  new  plans  make  for  rosier  expectation  of 
material  generosity,  however.  The  totals  will  soon  be  so 
high  that  no  single  giver  or  group  of  givers  can  say  that 
their  individual  contributions  decisively  influenced  the 
outcome.  One  of  the  denominations  of  the  United  States 
recently  finished  a  campaign  for  over  one-hundred  mil- 
lions of  dollars.  The  records  show  that  no  individual 
gave  more  than  seven  hundred  and  fifty  thousand,  and 
that  the  one  gift  of  three-quarters  of  a  million  was  a  far, 
far  cry  from  the  next  largest  gift. 

With  the  most  of  the  church  money  coming  from  the 
pockets  of  what  we  call  the  plain  people  we  have  less  to 
fear  as  to  a  repressive  use  of  such  money  against  free- 
dom of  speech  than  if  the  money  came  chiefly  from  the 
rich.  The  ordinary  man  is  not  only  the  bulwark  of  the 
State  but  of  the  Church  as  well.  He  will  sanction  the 
expenditure  of  money  for  more  progressive  social  pur- 
poses than  will  he  in  a  more  favored  lot  who  has  a 
greater  stake  in  the  continuance  of  a  given  set  of  in- 
dustrial circumstances.  The  Inter-Church  Movement, 
for  example,  recently  set  aside  a  considerable  sum  for 


42      CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

the  investigation  of  the  Steel  Strike  of  1919.  Because 
of  the  manifest  impossibility  of  getting  reliable  informa- 
tion from  the  newspapers,  the  leaders  of  the  Movement 
felt  that  it  was  only  proper  that  twenty-two  millions  of 
church  people  in  the  United  States  should  at  least  have  an 
opportunity  of  learning  the  facts  concerning  a  grave  in- 
dustrial crisis.  Who  would  be  more  likely  to  approve 
such  use  of  funds,  the  rich  man,  or  the  "plain  man''? 
More  than  one  rich  man  saw  in  the  investigation  itself 
something  almost  resembling  sacrilege.  But  the  plain 
man  is  not  an  easy  victim  of  any  such  fears.  He  can  be 
reached  readily  by  arguments  that  point  toward  the 
common  welfare.  Moreover,  he  himself  wants  to  know. 
With  the  contributions  coming  from  the  mass  of  the 
people  the  framing  of  appeals  for  funds  will  have  to 
lay  more  and  more  stress  on  the  social  value  of  the  ends 
to  which  the  funds  are  to  be  put.  The  man  who  is 
skilled  in  dealing  with  favored  individuals  on  their 
weaker  sides  will  find  it  advantageous  to  develop  other 
types  of  argument  if  he  is  to  be  shifted  to  the  field  of 
public  appeals.  It  is  true  that  under  the  new  system 
we  shall  not  have  so  many  buildings  honoring  the  names 
of  individual  donors,  but  we  shall  have  schools  and  hos- 
pitals with  every  cent  of  their  value  devoted  to  the 
common  welfare.  The  only  danger  in  reliance  upon 
masses  of  the  religious  constituency  for  financial  support 
is  the  possibility  of  waste  in  expenditure.  And  yet  this 
danger,  in  this  present  hour  of  pitiless  publicity,  be- 
comes less  and  less  important.  The  test  of  any  financial 
policy  is  its  fruit.  If  the  Church  shows  that  its  material 
outlays  are  producing  the  type  of  yield  for  which  the 
Church  stands,  charges  of  extravagance  will  get  scant 
heed.    Besides  we  must  remember  that  church  money 


THE  CHURCH  AS  SOLICITOR  43 

accounts  probably  get  minuter  scrutiny  by  greater  num- 
bers of  interested  and  conscientious  persons  than  any 
other  accounts.  Any  religious  organization  worth  the 
name  takes  good  care  that  the  possibility  of  the  misuse 
of  funds  for  personal  ends  is  reduced  to  a  minimum, 
and  with  all  the  books  open,  chances  for  foolish  and  in- 
considerate handling  of  consecrated  goods  also  becomes 
infrequent.  The  principal  chance  for  error  is  through 
some  fundamental  mistake  in  policy.  But  if  the  policy 
must  be  one  which  millions  of  men  pronounce  essentially 
in  harmony  with  Christian  ideals  the  possibilities  of 
substantial  mistake  here  should  not  cause  us  undue 
anxiety.  It  is  hard  to  frame  effective  appeal  for  gifts 
from  hosts  of  Christians  unless  the  appeal  be  sincerely 
Christian.  We  may  well  rejoice  that  we  seem  to  be  at 
the  beginning  of  a  day  when  we  must  lay  emphasis  more 
and  more  upon  the  deepest  human  needs  as  we  ask  for 
financial  support  in  great  church  campaigns. 


CHAPTER  IV 

THE   CHURCH   AS   PHILANTHROPIST 

The  Churcli  has  always  been  conceived  of  as  a  phil- 
anthropic agency  distributing  bounty  in  outright  gift 
with  a  more  or  less  lavish  hand.  The  line  between  the 
spending  of  the  Church  in  free  gifts  or  grants  of  aid  and 
in  direct  purchase  or  payment  in  harmony  with  a  defi- 
nite policy  is  indeed  so  fine  as  to  be  almost  fanciful. 
But  the  division  has  its  value  nevertheless  inasmuch  as 
Church  appropriations  which  are  a  bestowment  of  gifts, 
rather  than  expenditure  in  purchase  of  goods  or  services, 
raise  unique  ethical  considerations, — two  or  three  illus- 
trations of  which  it  may  be  worth  while  to  glance  at. 

We  may  revert  for  the  moment  to  a  distinction  which 
we  have  previously  utilized  between  material  conceived 
of  as  consumers'  goods  and  conceived  of  as  producers' 
goods.  By  producers'  goods  we  mean  broadly  the  tools 
with  which  men  work.  In  the  grant  of  consumers '  goods 
to  those  in  need  the  Church  will  always  have  a  responsi- 
bility. One  of  the  last  recorded  acts  of  Jesus  in  his  life 
with  the  Twelve  was  so  to  speak  to  Judas,  who  carried  the 
bag,  that  the  disciples  concluded  that  Jesus  was  ordering 
a  customary  gift  to  the  poor.  There  is  so  much  suffering 
in  the  world  that  the  Church  is  under  the  common  ob- 
ligation of  all  human  institutions  to  do  everything  pos- 
sible for  the  mitigation  of  that  suffering.  There  is  not 
now  in  the  world  food  enough  to  go  around,  or  at  least 
not  equitable  enough  distribution  to  allay  the  hunger  all 

44 


THE  CHURCH  AS  PHILANTHROPIST       45 

over  the  world.  In  the  presence  of  this  gnawing  pain 
one  duty  of  the  Church  is  to  hurry  forth  to  quick  re- 
lief. 

And  yet  if  the  Church  heeds  the  example  of  Jesus  she 
will  see  that  her  function  as  a  relieving  agency  is  not 
altogether  exhausted  in  the  gift  of  direct  aid.  Some- 
thing can  be  done  by  the  Church  toward  eliminating  the 
inequalities  of  the  present  industrial  system.  If  the 
Church  would  seriously  set  herself  to  a  constructive  plan 
for  the  betterment  of  the  modern  industrial  order  as 
such  she  could,  along  this  single  path,  accomplish  more 
for  physical  hunger  than  by  outright  scattering  of  mil- 
lions of  loaves  of  bread.  It  is  strange  to  note  the  up- 
roar which  arises  in  many  quarters  when  the  Church 
thus  proposes  to  improve  the  industrial  machine. 
Same  business  leaders  who  freely  admit  that  it  is  the 
duty  of  the  Church  to  distribute  alms  will  raise  a  hue 
and  cry  about  the  danger  of  losing  sight  of  the  pure 
Gospel  when  a  prophet  proposes  a  remedy  which  will 
help  do  away  with  the  necessity  of  giving  alms.  Still 
the  almsgiving  of  physical  goods  is  a  part  of  the  task 
of  the  Church.  The  work  is,  of  course,  not  so  to  be 
carried  on  as  to  pauperize  those  who  receive  the  gifts. 
This  danger,  however,  is  in  our  day  of  scientific  handling 
of  charitable  grants,  practically  negligible. 

"We  are  more  concerned  with  the  formal  appropriation 
made  by  denominations  to  instrumentalities  aiming  at 
religious  results, — results  as  fundamental  as  the  winning 
of  converts  and  the  carrying  forward  of  religious  educa- 
tion. The  organizational  features  of  the  Churches  and 
schools  are  so  many  instruments  to  be  used  in  the  ad- 
vance of  the  Kingdom.  Grants  to  such  institutions  are 
not  the  bestowal  of  bread  and  meat  upon  the  hungry,  but 


46      CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

the  supplying  of  tools  with  which  to  work.  In  such 
philanthropies  the  question  is  as  to  who  can  use  the  tool 
best.  We  have  sometimes  heard  social  organizations  cry 
for  help  somewhat  as  if  they  were  poor  stricken  travelers 
on  a  Jericho  road.  One  celebrated  solicitor  for  educa- 
tional funds  delights  to  tell  how  he  won  the  favorable 
response  of  a  leading  capitalist  by  painting  his  school 
as  the  wounded  sufferer  on  the  roadside  and  the  capitalist 
as  the  Good  Samaritan.  This  appeal  is  interesting 
chiefly  as  showing  what  a  solicitor  can  do  when  he  is  put 
to  it.  The  school  was  not  in  need  of  bread  or  of  medi- 
cine, but  was  essentially  asking  for  instruments.  The 
Gospel  Samaritan,  on  the  other  hand,  was  handing  out 
immediate  relief,  and  not  placing  tools  in  the  hands  of 
a  wounded  traveler.  If  such  had  been  the  nature  of 
the  neighborly  obligation  the  Samaritan  might  well  have 
passed  several  days  at  the  inn  to  find  out  just  what  in- 
strument the  pleading  man  could  best  use.  The  moment 
we  regard  the  agencies  of  the  Church  as  instruments  for 
the  accomplishment  of  a  purpose  the  question  becomes: 
who  can  best  use  the  instruments  ?  Professor  Palmer  of 
Harvard  has  made  an  interesting  remark  concerning  the 
distribution  of  scholarship  funds  which  have  been  placed 
in  his  trusteeship.  He  declares  that  it  is  his  observation 
after  many  decades  of  experience  with  college  students 
that  if  any  help  is  to  be  allowed  it  should  be  given  to  the 
students  who  are  capable  of  doing  the  finest  intellectual 
work,  rather  than  to  those  who  are  financially  neediest. 
This  at  first  sounds  rather  heartless.  But  there  is  im- 
plied here  the  distinction  which  we  are  trying  to  draw. 
If  the  problem  is  just  that  of  relieving  hunger  then  Pro- 
fessor Palmer's  course  does  indeed  seem  harsh.  If,  on 
the  other  hand,  the  problem  is  that  of  putting  tools  in 


THE  CHURCH  AS  PHILANTHROPIST        47 

the  right  hands  the  course  is  wise.  Professor  Palmer  in- 
sists that  his  policy  has  been  amply  justified  by  the  so- 
cial and  scholastic  results. 

The  Church  is  in  the  world  for  the  salvation  of  the 
souls  of  men  and  for  the  progressive  building  of  those 
souls  into  righteousness.  With  this  as  the  purpose  of 
the  Church  is  it  wise  for  denominations  to  vote  money 
outright  to  organizations  in  communities  where  there 
are  already  churches  enough  for  evangelization  and 
Christian  training?  We  have  heard  much  of  the  elimi- 
nation of  Church  competition  in  recent  years,  but  we 
have  not  yet  heard  too  much.  Let  us  trust  that  the  new 
plans  for  federation  and  for  union  will  so  succeed  as  to 
do  away  with  the  positive  evils  of  such  competition. 
Before  such  elimination  comes,  however,  we  shall  have 
to  dwell  on  some  other  phases  of  the  present-day  situa- 
tion than  just  the  waste  of  money  involved  in  competi- 
tion. The  fact  is  that  there  are  wide  tracts  of  territory 
in  the  United  States  to-day  where  members  of  this  or  that 
church  do  not  look  upon  souls  as  safely  saved  until  they 
are  connected  with  just  the  denomination  to  which  these 
worshipers  themselves  belong.  As  an  official  of  the 
Methodist  Church  I  have  had  ministers  from  rural  dis- 
tricts protest  against  federation  agreements  because  the 
evangelistic  services  of  churches  other  than  the  Methodist 
do  not  succeed  in  getting  seekers  through  to  a  clear  ex- 
perience of  salvation!  To  such  minds  all  reference  to 
financial  considerations  seems  trifling.  The  task  here  is 
to  bring  the  Methodist  or  the  Presbyterian  or  the  Baptist 
to  a  state  of  grace  where  each  will  concede  the  efficacy 
of  the  other's  theory  of  the  method  of  salvation-  If  we 
can  bring  the  Church  constituency  to  see  that  after  all  in 
organizational  features  the  Church  activities  are  instru- 


48      CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

mental,  we  can  do  much  to  shift  the  point  of  view  of 
many  Christian  workers.  Aid  in  overchurched  fields  is 
now  sought  as  if  it  were  the  necessities  of  spiritual  life, 
while  what  is  really  bestowed  is  a  tool  which  may  be 
abused  in  unrighteous  competition.  To  overstock  a  com- 
munity with  churches  is  not  less  absurd  than  to  overstock 
it  with  steel  mills,  or  wheat  elevators,  or  cotton  factories, 
or  blacksmith  shops.  To  call  such  overstocking  phil- 
anthropy is  woefully  inaccurate  terminology. 

It  is  a  delicate  operation, — this  of  bringing  the 
churches  to  discern  the  difference  between  the  instru- 
mental features  of  the  Church  which  may  be  competi- 
tively wasted  and  the  Church  as  composed  of  persons 
who  are  ends-in-themselves  craving  the  fundamental  ne- 
cessities of  spiritual  existence.  One  of  the  recurring 
tendencies  repeatedly  manifest  in  the  history  of  the 
Church  is  this  of  confusing  means  and  ends.  If  the 
sacred  funds  raised  for  Christian  purposes  are  not  to  be 
wasted  in  a  reckless  competition  the  Churches  will  have 
to  come  to  a  more  intelligent  emphasis  on  what  salvation 
is,  as  over  against  the  manifold  methods  of  presenting 
the  ways  of  salvation.  "We  need  that  enlargement  of 
view  which  helps  us  see  that  there  may  be  many  meth- 
ods of  presenting  religious  truth  effectively  with  no  one 
method  having  conclusive  advantage  over  any  other. 

For  illustration  by  analogy  we  may  reflect  that  de- 
mocracy in  political  life  can  get  its  will  expressed  through 
widely  varying  forms  of  governmental  procedure.  Eng- 
land is  more  democratic  than  the  United  States  in  getting 
the  popular  will  quickly  into  action,  but  England's  form 
of  government  is  to  a  measure  monarchical.  Or,  to  take 
a  further  illustration,  the  Anglo-Saxon  method  of  de- 
termining the  guilt  or  innocence  of  an  accused  person 


THE  CHURCH  AS  PHILANTHROPIST       49 

is  trial  by  jury  with  the  rules  of  evidence  most  carefully 
prescribed.  The  Anglo-Saxon  mind  is  thrown  into  par- 
oxysms of  mirth  in  watching  the  Latin  mind  in  its  pro- 
cedure in  trying  to  find  the  truth  about  the  accused. 
The  Latin  reciprocates  with  contempt  toward  the  Anglo- 
Saxon.  And  yet  probably  as  many  guilty  persons  are 
brought  to  justice  under  either  system  as  under  the 
other.  Similarly  the  man  who  has  been  reared  a  Presby- 
terian may  have  some  difficulty  in  understanding  the 
trustworthiness  of  the  Baptist  or  Episcopalian  pathway 
into  the  Kingdom.  But  Episcopalian  or  Baptist  saint- 
liness  when  it  is  once  attained  is  quite  as  satisfying  as 
Presbyterian  saintliness.  For  saintliness  means  a  life 
lived  in  obedience  to  the  will  of  God,  and  the  gifts  and 
graces  which  flourish  from  such  obedience.  The  central 
governing  boards  of  most  churches  see  this  clearly. 
Their  duty  is  to  cease  making  grants  to  competitive  or- 
ganizations where  a  community  is  jammed  with  the  tools 
of  religion.  If  a  scant  handful  of  persons  desire  to 
have  in  a  community  of  twenty  other  churches  a  church 
of  their  own  stamp  there  is  no  objection  provided  they 
pay  their  own  expenses.  Any  group  of  believers  is  en- 
titled to  any  luxury  of  this  kind  that  they  can  them- 
selves pay  for.  If  a  man  desires  to  carry  two  watches 
he  can  do  so, — if  he  pays  for  them.  But  there  is  every 
objection  in  everyday  ethics  to  the  use  of  funds  raised 
generally  throughout  the  Church  for  the  spread  of  the 
Kingdom  of  God,  as  grants  to  such  groups.  If  the 
members  of  a  struggling  Church — with  other  Churches 
within  a  stone's  throw — piteously  wail  out  that  the 
mother  denomination  is  leaving  them  to  starve  the  ad- 
equate reply  is  that  the  possibility  of  starvation  is  not 
up   for  debate.     There  is  enough  nourishment  in  the 


50      CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

community  to  prevent  any  one's  spiritual  famishing. 
The  sole  question  is  whether  an  extra  instrument  shall 
be  placed  in  the  hands  of  persons  who  are  showing  that 
they  have  not  the  slightest  understanding  of  its  proper 
use.  The  problem  is  not  that  of  allowing  the  Church 
to  die, — ^it  is  rather  that  of  keeping  an  instrument  out 
of  reach  of  the  wrong  hands. 

More  important,  however,  than  this  negative  duty  of 
withholding  is  the  positive  need  of  the  Churches  coming 
to  some  agreement  and  understanding  by  which,  either 
through  direct  cooperation  or  the  partition  of  territorial 
responsibility,  they  can  throw  masses  of  material  sup- 
port into  unchurched,  or  foreign  speaking,  or  rapidly 
changing  communities  for  the  sake  of  Christianity's 
getting  a  quick  hold  where  otherwise  everything  will 
fall  apart,  morally  speaking.  Here  again  the  Church 
must  be  on  guard  so  to  make  its  grants  as  to  call  forth 
all  the  latent  strength  of  the  community  itself.  At  the 
start  such  communities  may  require  practically  all  the 
resources  from  outside.  But  they  should  not  be  helped 
a  day  longer  than  is  required  to  develop  their  own  self- 
reliance.  It  might  conceivably  be  good  policy  for  a 
denomination  to  throw  all  its  available  power  for  some 
years  into  a  given  locality.  And  then  for  another  period 
of  years  to  throw  none  of  its  material  there.  It  is  well 
for  us  all  to  remember  w^hat  help  is.  Help  is  certainly 
not  such  direct  aid  as  to  leave  the  aided  organization 
nothing  to  do  of  itself.  Help  is  aid  in  cooperation  with 
effort  on  the  part  of  the  beneficiary. 

A  further  illustration  of  the  possibility  of  ethical 
laxity  in  church  finance  can  be  seen  in  the  aid  given  to 
or  withheld  from  denominational  educational  institu- 
tions.    The  denominational  colleges  of  the  country  have 


THE  CHURCH  AS  PHILANTHROPIST       51 

been  and  are  a  part  of  the  glory  of  the  American  educa- 
tional system.  The  virtue  of  such  institutions  has  been 
not  so  much  in  the  excellence  of  the  expert  instruction 
as  in  the  ideals  that  have  prevailed  in  the  colleges,  and 
in  the  Christian  atmosphere.  The  view  of  the  world 
from  the  college  window  has  been  Christian  and  the 
spirit  of  service  has  been  Christian.  We  recognize  to- 
day a  quasi-personality  of  social  institutions, — colleges 
among  the  number.  The  youth  who  becomes  a  member 
of  such  a  body  partakes  of  the  indefinable  virtues  and 
vitalities  of  the  body  itself.  The  school  puts  its  mark 
upon  him, — a  mark  which  he  never  would  have  known  if 
he  had  studied  alone  at  home  or  if  he  had  been  lost  as 
an  infinitesimal  freshman  in  a  huge  university.  We 
have  all  this  in  the  back  of  our  minds  when  we  speak 
of  the  tradition  of  the  school, — or  of  the  school  spirit, — 
or  of  the  school  stamp. 

Once  more  we  may  take  advantage  of  the  apparent 
coldbloodedness  of  Professor  Palmer's  advice.  Inas- 
much as  the  process  of  education  is  so  costly  that  social 
groups  must  undertake  this  process  at  an  expense  which 
never  can  be  met  by  the  students  themselves, — an  ex- 
pense which  rightly  calls  for  appropriations  from  all 
the  funds  which  are  legitimately  at  the  disposal  of  a 
denomination, — we  may  properly  insist  upon  a  prefer- 
ence for  the  schools  which  are  doing  the  best  work.  Put 
the  tools  into  the  hands  of  those  who  can  use  them  best ! 
The  teaching  of  the  parable  of  the  pounds,  which  has 
been  so  often  enforced,  is  in  place  here.  To  take  away 
the  one  pound  from  the  servant  who  had  carefully  kept 
it  wrapped  up  in  a  napkin  is  indeed  a  cruelty  if  the 
pound  is  something  to  eat ;  but  if  the  pound  is  an  instru- 
ment with  which  to  work  it  morally  belongs  to  the  man 


52      CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

who  knows  how  to  expand  one  pound  into  ten.  Inas- 
much as  the  Church  is  doing  so  much  to  support  educa- 
tional institutions  the  only  ethical  grant  of  the  money- 
is  to  give  it  to  those  who  can  put  it  to  the  wisest  use. 

This  will  of  course  be  met  by  protest  from  poverty- 
stricken  colleges  all  over  the  country.  We  shall  be  told 
of  the  devotion  of  the  founders  of  other  days,  of  the 
possibility  of  the  professor's  coming  close  to  a  student 
in  a  small  school,  and  of  the  intensity  of  the  religious 
spirit  that  prevails  in  such  schools, — all  of  which  is  in- 
teresting but  may  be  irrelevant.  The  educational  tools 
of  the  present  day  are  costly  and  delicately  contrived, 
loaded  with  possibilities  of  good  and  ill.  They  belong 
only  to  those  who  can  wield  them  aright.  There  is  a 
world  of  suggestion  in  the  old  adage  that  it  is  the  busi- 
ness of  the  college  to  teach  the  young  idea  how  to  shoot. 
Freedom  of  thought  is  safe  only  in  the  countries  where 
the  young  idea  knows  how  to  shoot  straight, — and  to 
point  at  the  targets  worth  hitting.  It  will  not  do  for 
Society  to  be  subjected  to  a  fusillade  from  young  ideas 
that  have  been  imperfectly  trained  to  shoot. 

This  may  be  seized  upon  by  some  who  maintain  that 
it  is  a  waste  of  money  for  the  Church  to  be  devoting 
large  sums  at  the  present  time  in  direct  appropriations 
to  educational  institutions.  We  have  no  patience  with 
such  objection.  AVe  shall  have  occasion  to  say  later 
that  we  believe  most  heartily  that  one  of  the  chief  obliga- 
tions of  the  Church  of  to-day  is  to  train  its  membership 
in  hard  thinking.  And  around  the  hard  thinking  should 
be  the  genuinely  Christian  atmosphere.  We  are  all 
willing  to  admit  that  there  is  no  good  reason  why  the 
Church  should  go  to  expense  for  technical  schools  or  uni- 
versities  for    advanced    intellectual   research.     But   no 


THE  CHURCH  AS  PHILANTHROPIST       53 

education  is  even  liberal  unless  it  is  founded  upon  a 
liberal  view  of  the  world,  of  the  dignity  and  worth  of 
human  life,  and  of  the  forces  which  play  through  the 
world.  The  college  is  the  place  for  an  introduction  to  a 
general  world-view,  and  in  that  world  view  the  Christian 
perspective  should  be  regnant.  It  is  significant  to  note 
that  among  the  first  items  asked  for  in  the  recent  Inter- 
Church  Campaign  was  the  sum  of  one  hundred  millions 
of  dollars  to  be  devoted  outright  in  grants  of  aid  to 
educational  institutions. 

If  any  factors  in  our  present  life  need  Christianization 
the  educational  need  that  Christianization.  There  are 
inherent  tendencies  in  educational  systems  which  are 
away  from  the  best,  and  any  amount  of  money  is  well 
spent  that  will  counteract  the  downward  pull  of  such 
gravitations.  For  example,  the  teaching  profession  itself 
tends  to  become  a  vested  interest.  It  is  natural  that 
after  men  have  spent  thousands  of  dollars  in  fitting 
themselves  to  instruct  in  a  specialty  they  should  not  care 
to  see  that  specialty  lose  its  importance  in  the  eyes  of 
Society.  So  we  have  many  programs  bolstered  up  that 
are  of  dubious  value  to  the  growing  youth  of  the  com- 
munity. What  hardship  has  not  the  adolescent  mind  of 
generation  after  generation  suffered  from  ever-emphasis 
on  the  classics  and  mathematics !  A  student  has  worried 
with  Latin  for  eight  years,  for  example,  and  has  left  the 
last  recitation  with  relief  that  he  will  never  have  to  look 
at  Latin  again.  Most  of  such  over-emphasis  comes  be- 
cause we  have  groups  of  teachers  who  can  teach  such 
branches  and  nothing  else.  All  that  saves  us  from  the 
tyranny  of  such  vested  interests  is  the  general  good 
sense  of  the  community.  The  Church  should  have  the 
same  good  sense  and  ask  at  least  this  question, — ' '  What 


54      CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

kind  of  intellect  is  the  college  turning  out?"  Is  not 
Christianity  synonymous  with  good  sense? 

The  second  danger  in  educational  institutions  against 
which  the  power  of  great  educational  funds  in  the  hands 
of  the  Church  can  well  guard  is  the  over-development 
of  the  technically  scientific  spirit,  though  the  scientific 
temper  as  such  should  be  claimed  for  the  Kingdom. 
Science  moves  largely  in  the  realm  of  method.  She 
deals  with  instruments, — especially  instruments  of  pre- 
cision. There  must,  we  repeat,  be  a  closer  alliance  than 
ever  between  the  Church  and  the  scientific  temper.  The 
Church's  ideal  of  the  worth  of  a  human  life  has  indeed 
so  far  influenced  modem  thought  that  there  is  little 
danger  of  our  American  institutions  running  to  the  ex- 
tremes of  barren  technicalism.  But  the  emphasis  on  the 
human  values  must  not  be  lifted.  A  friend  of  the  writ- 
er's was  once  visiting  a  Latin- American  country  famous 
for  a  medical  institution  which  was  technically  of  high 
excellence.  In  particular,  a  marvelous  technique  for  de- 
veloping vaccine  for  smallpox  had  been  perfected  in  the 
institution.  The  establishment  was  justly  celebrated 
for  this  specialty,  but  there  was  more  neglected  and 
ignored  smallpox  in  a  given  radius  around  that  institu- 
tion than  in  any  other  like  territory  in  South  America. 
When  the  visitor  from  North  America  tried  to  point  out 
this  unfortunate  coincidence  he  was  met  by  an  uncom- 
prehending stare.  The  events  of  the  past  war  have 
revealed  to  us  all  too  clearly  what  to  expect  when  high 
scientific  proficiency  becomes  harnessed  to  a  low  human 
ideal. 

We  are  not  among  those  who  fancy  that  this  problem 
of  the  Christianization  of  education  can  be  adequately 
met  by  such  campaigns  as  that  to  put  the  Bible  in 


THE  CHURCH  AS  PHILANTHROPIST       55 

the  public  schools.  Through  cooperative  efforts  the 
Churches  are  beginning  to  take  account  as  never  before 
of  the  essentials  of  Christian  ideals  for  humanity  upon 
which  we  can  all  agree.  The  Christian  Church  has  a 
right  to  insist  that  at  least  in  its  broad  outlines  this 
human  ideal  is  to  be  kept  central  in  the  instruction  of 
the  American  youth.  No  worthier  object  of  Christian 
philanthropy  can  be  found  than  this  of  maintaining  the 
exalted  human  reference  in  all  study.  One  of  the  most 
welcome  signs  in  American  educational  life  is  the  willing- 
ness of  the  state  universities  to  cooperate  with  the 
churches  which  try  to  put  near  the  campuses  of  the 
universities  prophets  of  moral  and  spiritual  power  who 
wiU  interpret  the  Christian  ideals.  The  state  universi- 
ties have  in  the  past  fifteen  years  taken  long  strides  in 
the  humanization  of  their  systems  of  instruction,  but  of 
course  they  cannot  give  themselves  to  specifically  re- 
ligious activities.  If  the  Christian  churches  would,  at 
whatever  direct  cost,  put  opposite  the  buildings  of  the 
state  universities  pulpits  or  platforms  for  outstanding 
religious  leaders  they  would  render  a  surpassingly  legiti- 
mate service, — no  matter  what  the  expense  might  be. 
If  this  were  a  denominational  competitive  propaganda  it 
would  be  all  wrong.  If  it  were  the  filling  the  minds  of 
students  with  Christian  ideals  it  would  be  all  right. 

The  indirect  effect  of  the  Church  upon  education  has 
already  been  immeasurable.  It  was  formerly  assumed 
that  the  ministry  and  the  teaching  profession  were  the 
chief  spheres  in  which  the  ideal  of  service  was  to  rule. 
If  a  boy  studied  engineering  or  medicine  or  law  he  of 
course  worked  with  the  expectation  of  being  able  to  make 
money  for  himself.  This  was  especially  true  of  the  field 
of  law.    But  even  this  field,  to  say  nothing  of  the  others, 


56      CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

has  been  invaded  healthfully  by  the  ideals  of  substan- 
tially Christian  service.  Probably  the  greatest  single 
group  of  the  brightest  minds  of  Harvard  University  is 
to  be  found  in  the  Harvard  Law  School.  This  would 
be  appalling  if  it  were  not  that  the  ideals  of  social  service 
now  markedly  govern  the  instruction  at  the  Harvard 
Law  School. 

This  chapter  is  intended  to  be  merely  illustrative  of 
the  responsibilities  of  the  Church  as  she  pours  out  her 
treasures  in  direct  gift  by  appropriating  boards.  The 
purpose  of  the  Church  is  to  hold  the  Christian  ideal  on 
high.  We  speak  often  of  the  broadening  influences  at 
work  in  the  life  of  Christianity  to-day.  Perhaps  it 
would  be  permissible  to  say  that  many  of  these  are  in  a 
legitimate  meaning  narrowing  influences, — narrowing 
the  Church  down  to  all-essentials, — the  idea  of  God, — 
the  relation  between  God  and  man.  In  all  her  use  of  her 
material  resources  the  duty  of  the  Church  is  one  and  the 
same,  and  this  duty  really  gives  unity  to  this  somewhat 
rambling  citing  of  illustrations.  But  what  gives  per- 
tinence to  the  discussion  is  the  peculiarity  of  human  na- 
ture to  take  less  seriously  the  responsibility  for  the  dis- 
tribution of  money  by  voted  grant-in-aid  than  the  respon- 
sibility of  directly  buying  goods  and  paying  salaries  and 
wages.  With  the  grant  of  aid  the  trustee  often  thinks 
his  responsibility  ended.  But  he  is  mistaken.  If  the 
Church  gives  bread  and  water  and  garments  to  the  man 
who  is  hungry  and  thirsty  and  cold,  the  gift  takes  the 
significance  not  just  from  the  relief  from  suffering,  but 
from  the  fact  that  certain  goods  are  due  all  those  with 
whom  Christ  has  identified  himself.  The  gift  given  to 
one  of  the  least  of  these  is  given  also  unto  hira.  The 
same  ideal  rules  in  the  use  of  reliofious  and  educational 


THE  CHURCH  AS  PHILANTHROPIST        57 

and  all  other  benevolent  instrumentalities, — the  ideal  of 
human  values  toward  which  every  instrument  should  be 
brought  into  play  with  its  greatest  effectiveness.  Money 
is  the  spirit  of  service  hardened  into  concrete  substance. 
When  the  Church  wastes  or  misuses  this  divine  instru- 
ment it  is  not  only  misusing  a  tool,  but  is  wasting  the  con- 
secrated saintliness  which  made  the  tool  possible.  And 
the  tool  itself  makes  for  the  wide  circulation  of  saintli- 
ness,— gives  it  purchasing  power, — and  carries  the  Gospel 
ideal  into  places  that  the  saint  could  never  personally 
reach  without  this  wonderful  instrument  for  the  exten- 
sion of  his  power. 

Here  may  be  as  fitting  a  place  as  any  to  protect  our- 
selves by  a  discrimination  in  our  use  of  the  term  *'mere" 
instrument.  When  throughout  this  essay  we  say  that 
human  values  are  to  be  held  superior  to  instrumental 
values  we  mean  that  instrumental  factors  are  to  be  kept 
in  the  instrumental  place,  and  not  pursued  as  ends-in- 
themselves,  or  as  producers  of  selfish  profit.  Viewed  as 
instruments  many  material  factors  are  unspeakably  val- 
uable,— valuable  enough  to  call  forth  all  the  energies  of 
the  human  will  in  their  quest.  A  seeker  of  money  may 
appear  to  us  a  frenzied  fool  until  we  learn  that  what  he 
seeks  is  an  instrument  which  will  open  the  eyes  of  a 
blind  child  or  that  will  carry  bread  to  a  famine-stricken 
nation.  All  materials  are  *'mere"  compared  with  the 
human  benefit  which  they  themselves  bring  to  mankind ; 
but  the  very  worth  of  those  benefits  bestows  worth  on  the 
materials.  Quinine  in  a  malaria-ridden  pest  hole,  diph- 
theria anti-toxin  in  a  plague-stricken  home,  chloroform 
on  a  battlefield,  wheat  for  the  starving,  and  coal  for  the 
freezing,  tools  for  necessary  work  of  the  world, — all  these 
are  matter,  but  matter  of  such  serviceableness  that  upon 


58      CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

a  critical  occasion  a  man  might  well  risk  his  own  life 
that  these  merely  physical  goods  may  get  into  the  hands 
of  those  who  desperately  need  them. 


CHAPTER  V 

CHRISTIAN  EXPENDITURE 

The  writer  recently  attended  a  meeting  of  churchmen 
at  which  the  possibility  of  securing  more  money  for 
presentation  of  the  bearing  of  the  Gospel  on  the  social 
question  was  brought  forward  as  a  reason  for  closer 
union  among  the  churches.  This  argument  was  no 
sooner  mentioned  than  one  somewhat  excited  brother 
protested  that  union  for  such  a  purpose  was  altogether 
aside  from  the  true  aim  of  the  Christian  Church.  He 
avowed  that  plans  for  expenditure  to  enlighten  Christian 
communities  as  to  social  duties  should  have  no  place  with 
organizations  whose  chief  calling  is  to  save  souls. 

In  spite  of  protests  like  this  those  who  are  pressing 
for  closer  church  union  insist  that  one  of  their  main 
hopes,  if  not  the  main  hope,  is  to  secure  more  adequate 
resources  for  remolding  the  thought  and  purpose  of 
Christian  communities  as  to  the  social  conditions  under 
which  men  live, — and  that  because  it  is  indeed  the  func- 
tion of  the  Church  to  save  the  souls  of  men.  This  evan- 
gelistic aim  being  primary  it  is  entirely  legitimate  for 
the  Church  to  further  any  policies  which  will  push  soul- 
winning  farther  and  make  it  easier.  Quite  likely 
evangelism  will  not  hereafter  make  so  limited  an  appeal 
to  individuals  as  our  fathers  heard.  The  Church  is  pro- 
ceeding on  a  safe  course  when  she  refuses  to  recognize 
longer  the  artificial  division  between  the  individual  Gos- 
pel and  the  social  Gospel,  for  social  conditions  are  to-day 

59 


60      CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

the  chief  obstacles  to  winning  individuals  for  the  King- 
dom ;  and  individuals  show  that  they  are  Christian  most 
convincingly  when  they  seek  to  make  the  social  order 
Christian. 

It  is  urged  that  we  must  reach  individuals  as  indi- 
viduals if  we  are  to  be  saviors  of  men.  Who  denies 
this?  The  Church  has  a  right,  however,  to  protest  that 
salvation  is  not  to  be  compressed  within  a  tight  round  of 
personal  duties.  The  race  has  through  the  centuries 
worked  out  a  code  of  moral  obligations  which  are  indeed 
now  sun-clear  as  binding  upon  the  consciences  of  Chris- 
tians. Men  are  not  to  lie  or  to  steal  or  to  be  cruel  to 
their  families  or  ugly  to  their  neighbors.  Progress  in 
Christian  living,  though,  consists  in  including  more  and 
more  persons  within  the  reach  of  righteous  contact  and 
more  and  more  deeds  under  the  Christian  law.  The 
abominable  separation  between  secular  and  sacred  took 
its  start  from  the  proneness  of  Christian  morality  to 
settle  upon  those  manifest  personal  religious  obligations 
which  are  self-evidently  binding.  Outside  of  this  little 
circle  the  moral  obligations  have  not  always  been  clear ; 
and  the  outer  field  has  therefore  become  secular  in  that 
here  men  have  felt  free  to  do  about  as  they  have  pleased 
inasmuch  as  no  Christian  law  has  seemed  to  be  imme- 
diately applicable. 

Sections  of  the  wider  territory  are  now  being  pre- 
empted for  colonization  by  Christian  morality.  The 
social  consequences  of  some  sources  of  conduct  which  we 
formerly  looked  upon  as  morally  harmless  or  indifferent 
have  been  seen  through  and  pronounced  evil.  Once 
these  evil  results  are  evident  the  obligations  of  the  Chris- 
tian conscience  are  as  indubitable  as  the  age-old  virtues 
of  abhorrence  of  lying  and  stealing.     The  purpose  of  all 


CHRISTIAN  EXPENDITURE  61 

evangelistic  effort  is  to  touch  the  central  springs  of  the 
will, — to  persuade  the  wills  of  men  into  harmony  with 
the  will  of  God.  If,  however,  the  immense  sums  now 
being  contemplated  for  evangelistic  campaigns  do  not 
look  to  an  extension  of  the  obligations  of  the  trans- 
formed life  beyond  the  narrowly  personal  the  evangelism 
will  not  be  fully  Christian.  We  indeed  strive  for  the 
transformation  of  individuals,  but  at  such  a  transforma- 
tion of  individuals  that  they  will  themselves  demand 
that  the  evangelistic  spirit  is  to  be  carried  into  all  the 
relationships  of  life. 

But  what  do  Christian  leaders  to-day  mean  when  they 
speak  of  duty  to  evangelize  institutions?  Are  not  in- 
stitutions impersonal?  As  organizational  tools  institu- 
tions are  indeed  impersonal.  But  institutions  in  another 
aspect  are  persons  behaving  in  definite  ways  when  they 
come  together  in  institutional  comradeships.  Human 
beings  within  these  institutional  unions  often  act  differ- 
ently from  their  behavior  outside.  And  there  are  well- 
known  laws  of  group  psychology  according  to  which  men 
attain  powers  in  groups  which  they  would  never  grasp  as 
loose  and  independent  units.  It  is  the  purpose  of  the 
Gospel  to  redeem  even  these  group  activities,  declaring 
that  as  members  of  institutions  men  shall  act  according 
to  the  spirit  of  the  Gospel. 

But  what  has  this  to  do  with  the  saving  of  souls? 
One  thing  it  has  to  do  with  the  saving  of  souls  is  to 
remove  most  formidable  obstacles  to  the  spread  of  the 
Kingdom  of  God  to-day,  those  obstacles  being  the  glar- 
ing contradictions  between  the  spiritual  conduct  of  mul- 
titudes of  men  in  the  narrowed  personal  rounds  and 
their  conduct  in  their  institutional  activity  as  members 
of  an  industrial  system,  or  of  a  warlike  nation,  or  of  a 


62       CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

professedly  superior  race.  If  it  is  true  that  we  have 
developed  many  surpassing  types  of  saintliness  in  the 
intimate  personal  duties  it  is  also  true  that  these  same 
saints  often  act  like  barbarians  or  savages  or  wild  beasts 
when  they  join  hands  as  partisans  of  a  political  view,  or 
as  competitors  in  an  industrial  order,  or  as  citizens  of  a 
nation  bent  on  war.  This  is  not  cynicism.  It  is  but 
recognition  that  the  Christianization  of  the  human  being 
is  progressive.  One  who  is  Christian  in  his  inner  per- 
sonal circle  may  be  far  from  Christian  in  his  business  or 
his  politics  or  his  patriotism.  And  in  international  con- 
tacts there  is  not  as  yet  any  faint  flush  of  the  dawn  of 
Christian  internationalism  conceived  of  as  a  public  opin- 
ion sworn  to  push  Christian  principles  into  international 
policy.  This  limitation  of  Christian  obligation  to  the 
immediately  personal  causes  the  outsider  to  pass  Chris- 
tianity by  as  of  little  consequence,  or  at  best  as  an  affair 
of  intimate  individual  privacy. 

The  Christian  Church  is  not  working  for  the  remaking 
of  the  more  inclusive  social  relationships  just  for  the 
sake  of  dabbling  in  something  which  is  none  of  her  busi- 
ness. Her  impulse  springs  out  of  a  realization  that  the 
imperfectly  moralized  institutional  activities  are  to-day 
a  hindrance  to  saving  the  souls  of  men.  Grant  that 
many  foolish  radicals  assail  existing  institutions  without 
the  slightest  spiritual  motive ;  that  many  yearners  after 
the  mystic  in  religion  are  distressed  by  over-emphasis  on 
a  social  Gospel  which  lacks  glow  of  warm  richness  of 
feeling.  Concede  that  it  is  possible  to  galvanize  an  in- 
dividualism which  professedly  sets  itself  against  a  social 
point  of  view  into  a  show  of  effectiveness  by  huge  audi- 
toriums and  mammoth  choruses  and  thunderous  brass 
bands  and  furious  exhortations  to  hit  a  sawdust  trail: 


CHRISTIAN  EXPENDITURE  63 

the  Kingdom  of  heaven  tarrieth  even  after  full  use  of 
such  methods.  The  Gospel  does  not  quite  mean — '* every 
man  for  himself  and  the  devil  take  the  hindmost. ' '  We 
admit  this  sounds  unjust  but  some  extreme  individualism 
is  so  self-centered  as  almost  to  warrant  such  a  charac- 
terization. 

Blessed  are  the  meek  for  they  shall  inherit  the  earth. 
What  did  Jesus  mean?  Suppose  he  meant  what  he 
said,  that  in  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven  those  filled  with  the 
spirit  of  the  Kingdom  would  be  the  masters  of  the  re- 
sources of  the  earth.  Obviously  in  this  respect  the 
Kingdom  has  not  yet  come.  Fancy  grouping  together 
the  owners  of  the  earth  in  some  vast  assembly, — the 
possessors  of  the  great  landed  properties,  the  holders  of 
the  mines,  the  controllers  of  the  oil-wells,  the  masters  of 
the  railroad  and  steamship  lines,  and  then  flaunt  over 
them  a  banner  inscribed,  ' '  Blessed  are  the  meek  for  they 
shall  inherit  the  earth."  The  most  charitable  interpre- 
tation of  such  an  inscription  would  be  that  we  had  got 
our  labels  mixed.  And  yet  that  one  contradiction  stands 
stubbornly  in  the  path  of  the  spread  of  Scriptural 
Christianity  throughout  the  earth.  The  charge  that 
Christianity  has  failed  is  absurd :  but  we  too  often  reply 
that  Christianity  cannot  justly  be  called  a  failure  where 
it  has  not  been  tried.  This  is  altogether  too  easy  and 
can  be  in  turn  met  by  the  further  query, — Why  has 
Christianity  not  been  tried?  The  answer  is  that  the 
evangelization  of  masses  of  men  in  their  industrial  and 
international  relationships  is  a  task  of  such  prodigious 
size  as  to  involve  almost  a  transformation  of  the  social 
climate.  Individualistic  evangelization  is  like  giving  a 
man  a  fire  for  his  own  hearthstone  as  compared  to  trans- 
formations of  the  cosmic  system  which  will  beget  new  and 


64      CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

warmer  airs  for  a  world  population.  The  transforma- 
tion has  indeed  to  come  through  individuals,  but  the 
individuals  must  cooperate  and  the  cooperative  effort  is 
to  stretch  out  to  such  extent  that  until  now  resources 
have  been  altogether  inadequate.  The  wealth  required 
will  indeed  be  stupendous,  demanding  an  altogether  re- 
adjusted focus  in  our  perspective  as  to  expenditure. 
Yet  we  shall  have  to  make  the  re-adjustment  if  our  ex- 
penditure is  to  be  thoroughly  Christian.  The  task  here 
is  somewhat  like  that  of  stamping  out  cholera  or  typhoid 
fever.  Individual  physicians  are  not  enough.  For 
thousands  of  housewives  to  boil  water  is  not  enough. 
The  whole  watershed  which  furnishes  water  to  cities 
must  be  kept  pure  by  community  cooperation. 

For  the  sake  of  a  further  glimpse  at  the  formidable- 
ness  of  the  duty  before  the  Church  let  us  reflect  for  a 
moment  that  the  task  implies  nothing  short  of  re-fashion- 
ing public  opinion.  "Whatever  the  channel  of  public 
authority  at  a  given  epoch  selfish  forces  seek  to  get  hold 
of  that  channel  and  use  it  for  their  own  purposes. 
Finance  thus  for  long  manipulated  legislatures.  Now 
Finance  seeks  the  outright  manufacture  of  public  opin- 
ion,— the  controlling  power  at  the  present  hour.  This 
does  not  mean  the  subsidizing  of  kept  editors  to  make 
whatever  comment  their  masters  wish  so  much  as  the 
manipulation  of  the  news  itself.  Probably  most  of  what 
we  read  in  newspapers  and  magazines  about  industrial 
and  international  matters  is  true, — but  it  is  half-true  and 
out  of  perspective.  If  the  Christian  Church  could  main- 
tain an  organ  for  the  publication  of  the  whole  truth, — 
or  all  the  relevant  facts — it  could  quickly  change  the 
most  serious  conditions  in  industry  and  international 
relationships.     The   fact — admitted   before   the   United 


CHRISTIAN  EXPENDITURE  65 

States  Senate  Commission — ^that  financial  concerns  inter- 
ested in  Mexico  pay  one  publicity  agent  $20,000  a  year  to 
see  that  the  United  States  newspapers  are  duly  informed 
as  to  all  the  horrors  of  Mexico,  gives  a  hint  as  to  the 
expense  confronting  the  Church  if  it  takes  seriously  the 
problem  of  informing  public  opinion  on  international 
matters.  Is  there  a  Church  official  in  the  United  States 
receiving  $20,000  a  year  ?  But  the  great  expense  would 
be  worth  while.  The  people  can  be  trusted  when  they 
know. 

Early  in  Christian  history  the  believers  in  the  new 
faith  were  called  those  of  the  Way.  Jesus  referred  to 
himself  as  the  Way.  When  he  spoke  of  sinners  he  often 
charitably  treated  them  as  stumblers,  and  upon  one  oc- 
casion broke  out  almost  fiercely  upon  those  who  put 
stumbling  blocks  before  even  the  least  of  those  walking 
upon  the  Christian  highway.  While  this  is  all  figure  of 
speech  it  is  rhetoric  deeply  imbedded  in  the  oldest  strata 
of  the  Gospel.  We  shall  never  cease  speaking  of  th^ 
Christian  life  as  a  Way.  How  odd  that  the  legitimate 
implications  of  this  figure  have  so  long  escaped  the 
Christian  understanding !  Can  we  imagine  any  one  ex- 
pression which  could  suggest  a  social  responsibility  more 
unmistakably  than  that  of  keeping  a  road  in  order! 
No  state  will  allow  the  care  of  its  roads  to  be  turned  over 
to  private  citizens.  The  building  of  the  road  and  its 
upkeep  are  distinctively  social  functions.  With  this 
rich  suggestiveness  the  Christian  way  is  in  the  keeping 
of  the  Christian  Church.  How  absurd  then  to  speak  of 
a  Christian  life  as  if  it  were  to  be  forever  the  overcoming 
of  obstacles  that  have  no  proper  place  in  the  road !  The 
Christian  life  is  not  meant  to  be  a  leaping  over  hurdles 
just  as  an  exhibition  in  spiritual  athletics.     It  is  some 


66      CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

day  to  be  a  natural  and  uninterrupted  progress  along  a 
road  so  smooth  that  a  child  can  travel  it  without  danger 
of  falling.  Some  lives  are  so  heedless  and  slovenly  that , 
they  will  stumble  on  any  road,  but  that  does  not  relieve 
the  Church  of  responsibility  for  leveling  down  the  moun- 
tains and  filling  up  the  valleys  and  making  smooth  the 
pathway  for  the  child  of  God.  If  it  be  objected  that 
we  are  laying  stress  on  *' environment "  our  reply  is  that 
a  road  is  indeed  environment,  but  that  it  is  an  environ- 
ment that  reveals  the  degree  of  consciousness  of  moral 
and  human  responsibility  of  the  citizens  through  whose 
kingdom  the  road  passes.  Roads  are  supposed  to  be 
kept  in  repair,  to  be  freed  from  robbers,  and  to  be  so 
built  that  travelers  can  march  over  them  easily  and 
smoothly  to  their  destinations.  We  all  may  fitly  pray 
for  the  deeper  coming  of  the  Kingdom  to  individual  wills 
who  voluntarily  surrender  to  the  will  of  God,  and  we 
may  then  as  fitly  show  our  sincerity  by  going  forth  to 
make  the  road  so  easy  that  the  difficulties  of  progress 
will  be  reduced  to  the  minimum. 

Keeping  to  this  New  Testament  figure  we  may  say 
that  up  to  date  traveling  on  the  Christian  way  has  been 
so  much  given  to  keeping  out  of  pitfalls,  to  climbing  over 
needless  barriers  and  to  dodging  robbers  that  the  traveler 
has  had  little  chance  to  view  the  landscapes  through 
which  he  has  passed, — or  to  make  rapid  enough  progress 
toward  the  fair  city  which  is  his  goal.  There  is  no  New 
Testament  warrant  for  fighting  unnecessary  temptations 
or  bearing  unnecessary  crosses.  Make  the  world  as  good 
as  we  can,  there  will  remain  temptation  enough  to  test 
the  strongest  soul.  Much  of  the  argument  against  the 
removal  of  the  social,  international,  racial  obstacles  to 
Christianity  to-day  is  about  on  a  par  with  that  of  those 


CHRISTIAN  EXPENDITURE  67 

wise  defenders  of  the  now  defunct  saloon  who  insisted 
that  saloons  should  line  the  highway  for  the  sake  of 
developing  in  youth  moral  strength  enough  to  resist  the 
temptation  to  enter.  Men  put  this  argument  with  grave 
faces  whose  sole  business  was  to  make  youth  enter.  To 
urge  a  day-laborer  to  be  Christian  with  all  the  obstacles 
put  in  the  path  by  social  institutions  of  an  unchristian- 
ized  industry,  to  ask  a  Chinaman  or  a  negro  to  tread  a 
path  almost  buried  under  international  and  social  preju- 
dice, borders  upon  the  tragic. 

It  is  the  business  of  the  Church  to  make  the  road  as 
easy  as  possible,  for  it  will  be  steep  and  stony  enough 
at  best.  The  distances  to  be  traveled  toward  spiritual 
ideals  will  themselves  tax  the  most  exuberant  strength 
and  the  toughest  endurance.  We  have  said  that  the 
Church  is  to  hold  aloft  the  spiritual  ideals  and  to  make 
them  winsome  and  magnetic  through  the  manifestation 
of  the  spirit  of  the  Christ.  Suppose  we  employ  another 
terminology  for  the  moment  and  say  that  it  is  the  busi- 
ness of  the  Church  to  make  it  easy  for  men  to  pursue 
the  good,  the  true  and  the  beautiful.  The  conquest  of 
the  good  is  indeed  a  mighty  moral  triumph  but  who  ap- 
plauds the  triumph?  It  should  be  the  duty  of  the 
Church  to  create  an  atmosphere  in  which  applause  for 
the  good  deeds  does  not  have  to  be  coaxed  or  coached, 
but  leaps  spontaneously  to  the  lips  of  the  world  itself. 

What  is  it  that  buoys  up  the  heart  of  the  soldier  in 
the  long,  dreary  marches  of  the  campaign?  We  say 
''marches  of  the  campaign"  advisedly,  for  there  may  be 
something  about  the  intoxication  of  battle  which  sweeps 
men  out  of  themselves.  The  sternness  of  war  is  the 
drudgery.  What  carries  soldiers  through  the  drudgery 
is  not  only  the  flag  for  which  they  are  fighting,  but  the 


68       CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

awareness  of  marching  in  step  with  the  spiritual  com- 
panionship of  a  nation.  So  in  the  long  marches  and 
campaigns  toward  the  Kingdom  of  God  the  struggle  of 
the  Church  to  make  public  opinion  in  which  moral  war- 
fare becomes  easy  will  be  an  imperative  duty.  We  can- 
not imagine  the  result  in  moral  achievement  if  we  could 
break  loose  from  the  doctrine  of  negative  triumph  over 
obstacles  to  the  doctrine  of  positive  victory.  Suppose 
we  could,  through  the  resources  of  the  Church,  at  least 
make  the  beginnings  of  a  society  in  which  men  would  not 
have  to  conquer  artificial  enemies  or  brave  public  senti- 
ment before  they  began  positively  and  constructively  to 
serve :  and  in  which  they  would  find  industry  and  society 
and  politics  pouring  inspiration  on  them  after  they  be- 
gan to  serve.  Suppose  the  Church  could  present  men 
with  opportunities  for  service  in  a  society  already 
thoroughly  imbued  with  a  cooperative  spirit  so  that  the 
effort  of  each  could  be  caught  up  by  the  reenforcing 
comradeship  of  all:  or  suppose  the  Church  could  create 
an  atmosphere  of  expectation  of  highest  Christian 
achievement  from  workers  and  could  crown  their  deeds 
with  the  laurel  of  wise  praise, — what  of  the  successes 
of  evangelism  in  such  a  supposed  world? 

Evangelism,  then,  the  center  of  Christian  effort,  but 
with  large-scale  attempt  toward  a  new  climate  or  en- 
vironment in  which  evangelism  can  urge  a  redemption 
of  all  man's  activities — ^this  is  a  policy  which  would  war- 
rant a  Church  expenditure  beyond  anything  which 
Protestantism  has  seen.  Granting  the  above  as  the 
Christian  policy  of  outlay  for  the  Church,  there  are  im- 
plications not  to  be  overlooked. 

Some  radicals  were  moved  to  mirth  by  a  defense  of  the 
existing  capitalistic  system  recently  advanced  by  one 


CHRISTIAN  EXPENDITURE  69 

anxious  to  do  ample  credit  to  that  system.  The  capital- 
ists serve,  said  this  defender,  by  being  spenders.  Hu- 
morous as  this  seems  when  we  think  of  some  objects  that 
capitalism  spends  for,  there  is  yet  a  truth  in  the  defense 
which  ought  not  to  be  laughed  out  of  court.  Putting  to 
one  side  all  the  absurdities  of  extravagance  and  all  the 
vulgarities  of  personal  display,  let  us  not  forget  that 
possessors  of  funds  serve  Society  when  they  devote  them- 
selves to  right  spending.  We  have  seen  little  serious 
argument  to  prove  that  if  state  socialism  came  suddenly 
into  power  in  a  country  like  ours  the  state  would  be  any 
better  spender  than  the  private  holders  of  capital. 
There  would  be  at  least  under  such  socialism  magnificent 
opportunity  for  wastefulness  of  which  legislators  might 
not  be  slow  to  take  advantage.  The  vulgar  expression 
that  public  finances  are  in  the  eyes  of  legislators  a  pork 
barrel  suggests  about  what  we  might  expect  from  state 
socialism  when  it  came  first  to  the  open  treasury  door. 
It  may  have  been  some  suspicion  of  grim  possibilities 
here  that  caused  the  remark  attributed  to  Bernard  Shaw 
that  if  he  were  a  multi-millionaire,  anxious  to  bestow 
benefit  on  the  public,  he  would  spend  his  money  on 
objects  which  the  public  would  not  itself  think  of  foster- 
ing. This,  of  course,  partakes  of  the  usual  Shavian  in- 
temperance, but  the  remark  has  some  pertinence.  The 
power  to  spend  money  brings  heavy  responsibilities. 
The  public  will  in  the  end  sanction  expenditures  of  a 
true  wholesomeness,  but  the  public  does  not  of  itself 
always  spontaneously  think  of  such  objects  of  expense. 
We  have  spoken  of  the  responsibility  of  the  Church 
so  to  wield  her  financial  power  to  create  a  world  which 
will  encourage  good  doing, — and  which  will  push  evan- 
gelism forward  to  an  all-inclusive  program.     May  we 


70      CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

now  say  that  this  involves  an  obligation  upon  the  Church, 
especially  in  these  critical  moments,  for  the  stimulation 
of  hard  thinking.  This  can  only  mean  encouragement 
of  discerning  judgments  by  competent  social  critics,  the 
publication  of  many  utterances  for  which  there  may  not 
be  at  the  outset  a  wide-spread  demand,  the  cultivation 
of  a  popular  temper  for  thorough-going  religious  argu- 
ment. The  Church  ought  to  help  create  a  market  for 
the  finest  intellectual  wares.  It  is  a  serious  reflection 
upon  Protestant  Christianity  that  leaders  of  Christian 
thinking  have  many  times  to  hesitate  as  to  whether  it  is 
worth  while  to  attempt  to  publish  discussions  of  the 
weightier  religious  problems.  In  scientific  circles  al- 
ready enough  of  interest  in  discovery  as  such,  has  been 
generated  to  make  possible  the  support  of  publications 
which  mark  advances  in  scientific  knowledge.  There  is 
not  much  corresponding  to  this  among  the  Christian 
churches.  One  of  the  tragedies  of  the  course  of  Protest- 
ant history  in  the  last  quarter  century  has  been  the 
difficulty  of  getting  patronage  for  adequate  treatments 
of  profound  religious  themes  except  for  writers  given  to 
sensationalism  or  possessed  of  an  unusually  brilliant 
style.  So  it  has  come  to  pass  that  even  Christian  preach- 
ers have  looked  outside  the  Church  to  students  like  Mr. 
Wells  for  the  formulation  of  newer  statements  of  the- 
ology,— this  too  when  the  problems  merely  on  the  intel- 
lectual side  are  more  intricate  and  complex  and  call  for 
more  power  of  sustained  reflection  than  in  any  epoch 
since  the  Church  fathers.  Criticize  the  Roman  Church 
all  we  please,  at  least  in  the  earlier  centuries  that  church 
achieved  a  union  of  piety  and  intellectual  power  which 
is  one  of  the  marvels  of  history.  "We  can  no  longer  ex- 
pect Church  leaders  to  be  encyclopedias  of  knowledge. 


CHRISTIAN  EXPENDITURE  71 

But  if  they  are  not  to  develop  genuine  intellectual  en- 
ergy they  wiU  fall  short  of  their  full  Christian  function. 
The  saints  of  the  early  Church  were  often  the  scholars 
and  thinkers.  Even  those  who  surrendered  themselves 
to  the  severest  practical  tasks  found  opportunity  for  the 
exercise  of  intellectual  talents:  they  conceived  of  them- 
selves as  worshiping  God  by  the  sheer  intensity  of  their 
thinking.  With  a  sound  spiritual  instinct  the  Church 
praised  such  high  discipline.  So  far  as  we  know  there 
was  no  sneering  at  mental  effort  in  churchmen  in  the 
old  days  when  the  Church  was  making  some  of  its  most 
practical  conquests. 

In  the  later  time  we  find  ourselves  utterly  amazed  at 
the  terrific  brain  vitality  of  a  man  like  Las  Casas.  Here 
was  a  reformer  so  devoted  to  freeing  the  natives  of  the 
West  Indian  Islands  as  to  bring  down  upon  his  head 
the  wrath  of  all  the  colonial  officials  of  his  day, — a  radi- 
cal scorned  as  a  wild  dreamer.  Yet  when  the  records  of 
his  life  are  studied  he  stands  forth  as  a  student  of  human 
conditions  to  whom  nothing  that  concerned  man  was 
empty  of  interest.  He  is  revealed  as  a  master  of  the 
knowledge  of  the  Christian  centuries  before  his  time. 
When  the  supreme  crisis  for  his  defense  of  the  Indians 
before  the  Church  council  arrives  he  appears  as  the 
ablest  debater  of  his  age.  After  the  lapse  of  nearly 
four  centuries  his  scholarly  narratives  are  the  basis  on 
which  historians  of  the  period  of  the  Spanish  exploration 
of  the  New  World  must  build.  Now  in  all  this  Las 
Casas  was  not  merely  the  individual  of  surpassing  native 
endowment;  he  was  the  child  of  his  Church, — a  church 
which  with  Christian  discernment  insisted  that  the  dis- 
cipline of  the  mind  is  one  of  the  heaviest  Christian  ob- 
ligations. 


72      CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

It  may  help  us  here  to  take  more  seriously  the  welfare 
of  the  church  constituency  committed  to  our  charge. 
An  illuminating  story  has  come  from  a  Russian  district 
which  passed  through  first  the  ''white"  terror  and  then 
the  "red"  terror.  After  the  Bolshevists  had  established 
their  system  they  increased  the  supply  of  physicians  in 
the  community  by  decreeing  that  hospital  internes  be 
recognized  as  trained  physicians.  Shortly  thereafter 
the  afflicted  community  protested  that  worse  than  the 
white  terror  or  the  red  terror  was  this  new  "green" 
terror.  It  is  our  duty  to  spare  congregations  the  dis- 
tress of  the  green  terror. 

As  with  the  intellectual  pursuits  so  also  with  the 
pursuit  of  the  beautiful.  It  will  prove  a  miserable  epoch 
in  the  history  of  the  Church  if  the  increasing  control  of 
financial  resources  does  not  accomplish  something  to  end 
the  divorce  between  religion  and  art.  The  Puritan  is 
needed  in  every  age  to  bring  us  back  to  moral  first  prin- 
ciples and  to  focus  our  attention  upon  the  primary  will- 
to-do-right.  But  the  Puritan  is  to  be  supplemented  by 
the  Christian  of  bigger  mold,  lest  art  be  driven  away 
from  the  believers  to  the  Philistines.  A  critic  of  the 
Christian  Church  exclaimed  in  the  early  months  of  the 
war  that  Christianity  had  shown  its  moral  bankruptcy 
through  the  shriller  outcry  over  the  injuries  to  the 
cathedral  at  Rheims  than  over  the  death  of  soldiers  on 
battlefields.  The  point  seemed  to  be  that  Christianity 
was  more  aesthetic  than  human.  So  far  as  we  now  re- 
call, it  was  not  the  Christian  Church  that  lost  its  balance 
in  any  such  outcry.  Moreover  when  the  leaders  of  the 
Christian  Church  protested  against  the  despoiling  of  the 
cathedral  the  protest  was  not  merely  against  the  defama- 
tion of  a  treasure  of  art.     The  Middle  Age  cathedrals  of 


CHRISTIAN  EXPENDITURE  73 

Europe  tower  skyward  not  merely  as  art  masterpieces  in 
themselves,  but  as  manifestations  of  the  achievements 
possible  when  an  entire  community  is  surcharged  at  once 
with  the  religious  spirit,  and  the  artistic  impulse,  and 
the  sentiment  of  human  brotherhood.  The  cathedrals 
are  not  the  achievement  of  any  small  group  of  geniuses. 
They  would  not  have  been  possible  except  in  social  groups 
whose  closeness  of  organic  unity  has  not  been  surpassed 
in  the  history  of  the  race.  All  classes  of  workers 
wrought  together,  fired  by  the  desire  to  create  a  stupen- 
dous material  expression  of  an  artistic  instinct  which  had 
become  religious,  and  of  a  religious  spirit  which  was 
seeking  outlet  in  the  finest  of  physical  forms.  Nothing 
since  the  cathedral  days  has  approached  this  triumph  of 
merging  the  spirit  of  brotherhood  with  enthusiasm  for 
religion  and  art. 

Here  again  the  Roman  Catholics  have  best  held  to  a 
high  ideal.  A  Protestant  Church  in  a  great  city  has 
often  debated  a  change  of  location  because  of  removal  of 
its  constituency.  The  Roman  Catholics  have  indicated  a 
willingness  to  buy  the  Protestant  building,  chiefly  for 
the  sake  of  preserving  the  spire, — a  miracle  of  grace  and 
symmetry  which  dominates  a  vast  field  of  view. 

Man  does  not  live  by  bread  alone.  The  too  heavy 
emphasis,  however,  upon  the  basic  utilities  of  life  has 
pushed  apart  elements  that  should  have  been  kept  to- 
gether. Intellect  has  become  skeptical,  art  has  become 
irreverent  and  religion  has  lost  itself  in  the  routine  of 
the  commonplace.  Henceforward  each  of  these  activi- 
ties must  move  in  a  more  or  less  separate  circle,  but  their 
reunion,  at  least  to  a  degree,  is  one  of  the  tasks  of  the 
greater  Church.  Since  its  beginning  Protestantism  has 
been  chronically  poor.     One  of  its  obligations  in  this 


74      CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

newer  day,  when  supporters  of  religious  enterprises 
seem  willing  to  think  in  terms  of  millions  rather  than 
of  hundreds  and  of  thousands,  is  to  open  again  the  chan- 
nels for  the  loftier  forms  of  worship.  The  fundamental 
task  of  the  Church  in  its  use  of  its  resources  is  to  make  it 
easy  for  men  to  do  the  will  of  God  in  an  atmosphere 
which  normally  and  naturally  suggests  obedience  to  the 
divine.  But  at  whatever  cost  the  Church  must  also  in- 
sist that  obedience  to  the  divine  will  is  not  complete  until 
we  think  God's  thoughts  after  Him,  and  until  we  seek 
expression  for  that  thought  in  beauty  permeated  with 
the  divine.  An  ardent  worshiper  once  declared  that  she 
could  never  listen  to  a  great  organ  in  an  American 
Church  without  realizing  with  a  pang  that  the  cost  of  the 
organ  would  have  provided  a  dozen  Protestant  chapels 
in  China.  It  would  perhaps  be  too  severe  to  suggest 
that  upon  the  occasion  of  a  like  comment  One  in  the 
olden  time  gently  rebuked  those  who  declared  that  the 
alabaster  box  should  have  been  sold  and  the  money  given 
to  the  poor.  Perhaps  a  more  suitable  reply  to  the  good 
woman  so  anxious  about  China,  would  be  that  full  Chris- 
tianity will  not  have  come  to  China  until  more  than  a 
dozen  chapels  are  replaced  by  temples  in  which  the 
Chinese  themselves  shall  hear  organ  strains  pealing  forth 
in  intrinsically  Christian  beauty. 

To  sum  up,  the  most  truly  Christian  expenditure  is 
for  evangelism, — but  for  an  evangelism  that  redeems  all 
of  man's  nature  and  activities,  reaching  forth  to  those 
wider  relationships  which  in  the  end  involve  the  veritable 
transformation  of  the  world's  social  climate.  If  some 
perplexed  saint  protests  that  the  social  gospel  never 
saved  anybody  the  adequate  reply  is, — possibly  not,  but 
because  the  saints  have  lacked  a  social  gospel  many  lives 


CHRISTIAN  EXPENDITURE  75 

have  not  responded  to  an  individual  gospel.  If  objec- 
tion arises  that  all  this  emphasis  on  money  seems  un- 
christian the  answer  is  that  such  objection  has  never 
realized  the  seriousness  of  the  present-day  religious  task. 
Before  the  social  atmosphere  can  be  finally  made  Chris- 
tian the  churches  will  probably  have  to  turn  their  build- 
ings over  to  school  room  purposes  for  religious  education 
by  experts  all  the  days  of  the  week.  All  of  this  at  great 
cost.  Why?  Simply  because  there  is  no  other  way, — 
and  the  work  must  be  done. 


CHAPTER  YI 

THE   CHURCH   AS   INVESTOR 

The  schemes  for  more  adequate  church  advance  almost 
all  contemplate  the  accumulation  of  funds  in  the  power 
of  the  Church  which  will  have  to  be  put  into  investment. 
Enthusiastic  leaders  of  interdenominational  programs 
talk  of  enormous  buildings  in  New  York  City  which  by 
their  very  height  will  at  least  S3anbolize  to  the  world 
something  of  the  importance  of  Protestantism.  Funds 
are  to  be  gathered  for  all  varieties  of  endowments.  Ed- 
ucational equipments,  hospitals,  institutional  churches 
are  to  draw  upon  endowments  abundantly  adequate,  and 
retired  preachers  and  teachers  are  to  be  supported  from 
the  income  of  investments. 

Of  course  the  social  radicals  protest  against  the  income 
from  any  endowment  funds.  Such  radicals  insist  that 
a  worker  is  entitled  to  the  full  produce  of  his  labor,  and 
that  interest  payments  are  a  tribute  exacted  from  the 
laborer  by  those  fortunate  enough  to  hold  legal  title  to 
the  invested  funds.  Interest  is  unearned  by  the  hold- 
ers of  bonds  and  other  securities. 

We  do  not  believe  that  such  assailants  of  income  from 
investments  have  ever  made  out  their  case.  There  is 
something  of  social  service  in  the  accumulation  of  funds 
to  be  used  productively  even  though  we  cannot  accu- 
rately indicate  the  limits  of  the  service.  The  ability  to 
get  money  together  and  to  keep  money  together  may  be 
a  social  virtue.     When  we  reflect  upon  the  almost  in- 

76 


THE  CHURCH  AS  INVESTOR  77 

evitable  tendency  of  money  to  get  away  from  the  ordi- 
nal}^ man  we  must  concede  at  least  a  measure  of  justifi- 
cation of  return  from  funds  in  the  social  service  rendered 
in  the  gathering  of  the  funds  and  in  their  conservation. 
This,  of  course,  is  not  intended  as  an  exoneration  of 
exorbitant  or  dishonest  returns,  nor  is  it  intended  as 
justification  for  saddling  on  industry  the  burden  of  mak- 
ing profits  for  ''water"  or  monopoly  values.  It  is 
against  these  last  that  the  socialist  attack  has  unerring 
pertinence. 

But  to  carry  the  reflection  a  little  farther,  suppose 
some  species  of  state  socialism  should  descend  upon  us 
over  night.  The  new  order  would  find  itself  in  the  pres- 
ence of  accumulated  funds  now  being  used  for  religious 
purposes.  The  cry  might  at  once  arise  for  the  outright 
confiscation  of  such  funds.  Let  us  suppose  that  the 
funds  should  thus  be  confiscated.  If  Society  understood 
itself  it  would  shortly  find  that  it  would  have  to  set  apart 
from  the  social  income  for  just  such  purposes  as  the 
philanthropic  and  religious  agencies  had  been  serving 
amounts  equal  to  the  returns  yielded  by  the  confiscated 
endowments.  For  the  resources  of  which  we  are  speak- 
ing in  this  essay  are  thought  of  as  devoted  to  genuine 
social  purposes, — purposes  without  whose  realization  so- 
ciety would  quickly  find  itself  at  a  serious  loss. 

The  critic  urges,  however,  that  under  such  socialism 
society  itself  would  be  the  authority  in  the  disposition 
of  the  social  income  and  not  ecclesiastical  officials.  This 
may  be  true,  but  forthwith  a  host  of  vexatious  questions 
spring  upon  us.  The  organ  of  society  as  a  whole  is  the 
State.  If  the  churches  have  to  look  to  the  State  for 
appropriations  to  religious  enterprises  the  old  vexed 
question  of  the  relation  of  Church  and  State  is  with  us 


78      CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

again.  Moreover,  deplore  it  as  we  may,  the  tendency  of 
our  time  is  toward  questioning  distrust  of  State  manage- 
ment. We  may  be  doubtful  whether  if  socialism  comes 
it  will  be  state  socialism.  The  State  may  indeed  own 
some  basic  resources  of  the  country.  Many  such  re- 
sources might  properly  be  nationalized, — mineral  and 
forest  riches,  irrigation  and  water  power  streams,  in- 
dustries like  the  railroads  which  are  vital  to  the  life  of 
the  nation  as  such.  A  legitimate  argument  can  be  made 
for  such  nationalization,  but  not  much  of  an  argument  in 
the  light  of  present-day  experience  for  the  management 
of  such  enterprises  by  the  State  itself.  State  handling 
of  economic  instruments  is  liable  to  be  choked  by  red 
tape,  or  smothered  in  the  dust  of  bureaucracies.  The 
centralization  of  power  involved  in  such  management  is 
so  complete  that  the  people  fear  the  State  and  hedge  it 
about  with  all  possible  checks  and  restraints.  In  the 
new  order  Society  would  probably  have  to  hand  over  to 
the  churches  sums  of  money  to  be  used  by  the  churches 
themselves. 

We  admit  that  we  have  not  yet  squarely  met  the  so- 
cialistic attack  on  interest.  The  socialist  holds  that  if 
society  were  directly  taxed  for  religious  and  philan- 
thropic purposes  the  tax  would  be  paid  by  those  better 
able  to  pay  it  than  are  the  laborers  out  of  whose  earn- 
ings the  socialist  declares  that  interest  now  comes.  We 
think  that  the  argument  here  tells  more  heavily  against 
some  forms  of  dividends  than  against  interest, — interest 
being  more  in  the  open,  seldom  rising  to  more  than  five 
per  cent,  and  ordinarily  going  more  directly  to  reward 
thrift  than  does  the  return  from  stocks.  The  unearned 
increment,  strictly  speaking,  does  not  figure  here.  The 
burden  of  proof  is  on  the  socialist.     We  cannot  see  that 


THE  CHURCH  AS  INVESTOR  79 

he  has  made  out  his  case  against  interest, — except  in- 
terest on  "water"  and  on  properties  accumulated  un- 
socially.  It  would  indeed  be  a  grim  joke  to  have  any 
set  of  workers  reproducing  in  interest  every  twenty 
years  a  sum  equal  to  the  principal  of  a  gain  originally 
acquired  unsocially  or  anti-socially.  In  other  days  the 
foundations  of  some  fortunes  which  have  held  together 
for  centuries  were  laid  in  piracy,  or  slave-trade,  or  the 
sale  of  alcoholic  liquors,  or  in  food-adulteration.  Is  it 
not  bracing  to  think  of  the  interest  returns  on  such 
fortunes,  and  of  what  they  amount  to  in  the  course  of 
an  heir 's  life-time  ?  But  even  this  is  not  quite  conclusive. 
Apart  from  the  question  as  to  the  genesis  of  a  fortune  is 
the  question  as  to  the  use  to  which  the  fortune  is  now 
being  put. 

The  most  attractive  theory  of  socialism  to-day  is  gild- 
socialism,  in  which  Society  is  conceived  of  as  united 
under  a  federalist  principle,  with  constituent  groups 
working  according  to  their  own  genius  and  spirit.  If 
we  ever  arrive  at  such  gild-socialism  there  is  nothing  to 
forbid  the  prophecy  that  the  Church  will  be  conceived 
of  as  one  of  the  bodies  of  Society,  ruling  itself  according 
to  its  own  law.  Even  under  gild-socialism  economic 
gilds  might  make  a  modest  return  to  the  Church  for 
the  privilege  of  using  some  of  the  Church's  investment 
funds.  In  any  case  if  these  are  expended  wisely  the 
expenditure  will  have  to  go  forward  under  the  initiative 
of  the  Church  itself,  even  if  there  is  some  checking  and 
supervising  body  outside.  "We  could  contemplate  only 
with  dismay  a  socialistic  regime  under  which  a  central 
committee  would  allot  to  the  constituent  organizations 
of  Society  the  money  to  be  spent  by  those  societies  with 
detailed  directions  as  to  the  manner  of  the  spending. 


80      CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

If  it  be  replied  that  state  socialism  has  never  yet  any- 
where had  a  fair  chance,  and  that  state  socialism  as  we 
have  seen  it  is  nothing  but  a  plutocratic  oligarchy  work- 
ing through  the  State  forms,  the  just  rejoinder  is  that 
the  fault  of  which  we  speak  is  inherent  in  the  state- 
socialistic  system.  Nothing  in  human  experience  sug- 
gests that  any  central  body  of  Society  will  be  wise  enough 
to  tell  how  the  resources  of  the  larger  social  groups  shall 
be  expended.  The  ones  who  stand  closest  to  the  task 
are  those  whose  authority  should  be  final, — until  the 
groups  begin  to  make  patent  blunders.  We  say  at  times 
that  the  man  who  uses  the  tool  has  rights  over  the  tool 
prior  to  the  rights  of  all  other  persons  whatsoever.  This 
is  as  true  of  big  tools  as  of  little,  of  instruments  like 
organizations  as  truly  as  of  mechanisms  which  one  man 
can  control.  The  experience  of  the  user  of  the  tool  is 
of  first  consequence  in  all  plans  of  appropriations  for 
its  use. 

Furthermore  some  kind  of  control  over  ecclesiastical 
funds  by  the  Church  will  be  necessary  not  merely  to 
guard  the  Church  against  the  stupidity  and  dullness  of 
State  bureaucracies  but  against  the  eccentricity  and 
aberration  of  occasional  outbursts  of  popular  sentiment. 
Suppose  we  had  a  type  of  organization  of  society  that 
would  put  expenditures  entirely  in  the  hands  of  agencies 
immediately  responsible  to  the  general  popular  will. 
We  are  among  those  who  long  for  the  speedy  democrat- 
ization of  all  phases  of  social  life, — ecclesiastical,  educa- 
tional, industrial.  And  yet  if  democratization  fully 
comes  in  all  these  circles  the  people  themselves  will  have 
to  take  steps  to  guard  themselves  against  their  own 
excesses  of  sentiment.  Social  intoxication  is  just  as 
possible  as  individual  intoxication, — and  intoxication  by 


THE  CHURCH  AS  INVESTOR  81 

a  half-seized  or  half-understood  idea  is  just  as  deadly 
as  intoxication  by  a  drug.  The  foremost  democrats  of 
history  have  indeed  been  those  who  have  trusted  most  to 
the  people  in  the  long  run,  but  who  have  observed  the 
most  thorough  precautions  against  being  influenced  by 
sudden  bursts  of  popular  sentiment.  The  most  effective 
popular  leaders  have  oftentimes  been  those  who  have  had 
the  liveliest  horror  of  becoming  too  popular.  IMoods  in 
a  people  are  more  serious  than  moods  in  an  individual. 
Panic  in  one  hundred  thousand  men  is  more  terrible 
than  panic  in  one  man.  So  that  if  Society  comes  to 
take  possession  of  all  the  funds  that  have  been  accumu- 
lated for  endowment  purposes,  probably  one  of  the  first 
steps  will  necessarily  be  the  installation  of  a  system  of 
checks  to  prevent  the  wasting  of  the  funds  in  ill-consid- 
ered projects. 

Social  reorganization,  however,  is  not  yet  accomplished. 
AYe  are  working  under  the  present  system  and  we  shall 
very  likely  have  to  work  under  that  system  through  a 
long  future.  Investments  constitute  a  phase  of  the 
moral  problem  which  the  Church  has  to  face  now.  What 
principles  must  it  follow  in  order  to  make  the  most 
Christian  use  of  its  funds?  We  repeat  that  there  is  no 
absolute  standard  which  will  settle  this  question  by  rule- 
of-thumb.  All  we  can  do  is  to  do  the  best  possible 
under  sets  of  circumstances  thrust  upon  us  by  the  cur- 
rent of  events. 

The  Church  need  not  lay  itself  open  to  the  charge  that 
it  passively  accepts  the  income  of  investments  without 
rendering  any  service  in  the  field  in  which  the  investment 
is  made.  The  severe  charge  against  almost  all  investors 
is  that  they  look  only  at  the  regularity  and  the  security 
of  their  returns,  with  no  concern  whatsoever  for  the 


82      CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

methods  by  which  the  business  which  yields  the  return 
is  managed.  The  Church  shows  itself  worthy  of  its  re- 
sources by  the  uses  to  which  it  puts  them.  But  it  is 
possible  also  for  the  Church  to  be  deserving  of  its  money 
by  some  moral  supervisional  responsibility  for  the  en- 
terprises which  yield  the  return. 

It  ought  not  to  be  possible  to  bring  the  charge  of 
absenteeism  against  the  Church.  Suppose,  for  example, 
that  the  Church  receives  by  bequests  farm  lands,  or  that 
it  invests  in  farm  lands.  Its  investment  may  mean  noth- 
ing more  than  lending  money  to  be  used  in  the  cultiva- 
tion of  the  soil.  Inasmuch,  however,  as  it  appears  with 
money  to  lend,  and  inasmuch  as  enterprises  are  desirous 
of  proving  attractive  to  it  as  a  lender,  it  has  a  right  at 
least  to  know  how  the  farming  is  carried  on.  Sometimes 
the  mere  asking  of  questions  leads  to  reforms.  Has  a 
Church  a  right  to  lend  money  to  a  farmer  who  in  this 
day  of  worldwide  food  shortage  abuses  his  land  by  un- 
scientific methods?  With  food  prices  soaring  to  the 
skies  a  Church  agent  might  well  insist  that  any  money 
lent  through  his  instrumentality  must  go  to  those  who 
act  under  a  regard  for  social  morality.  This  suggestion 
may  indeed  have  for  some  its  tinge  of  the  humorous, — 
because  of  the  proverbial  ignorance  of  churchmen  as  to 
the  actual  ongoings  of  the  world's  rougher  work.  It 
is  related  that  a  Church  establishment  in  England  was 
once  seized  by  a  spasm  of  conscientiousness  as  to  social 
responsibility  and  sent  a  famous  theologian  forth  to 
observe  how  the  Church  lands  were  being  farmed. 
''That's  a  fine  field  of  potatoes,"  said  the  theologian,  as 
he  greeted  the  cultivator.  The  crushing  reply  was, 
"Yon's  turnips."  But  it  is  not  necessary  to  send  forth 
theologians  on  such  pilgrimages  of  inquiry.     If  absentee- 


THE  CHURCH  AS  INVESTOR  83 

ism- is  the  charge  brought  against  those  who  merely  re- 
ceive returns  without  any  service  to  the  properties  which 
produce  the  returns,  this  charge  can  be  met  by  a  little 
c^iitual  attention  to  the  productive  enterprise.  We  are 
referring  particularly  to  judgment  of  undertakings  by 
reference  to  the  human  and  moral  standards  of  which 
the  Church  can  speak  with  authority. 

Two  suggestions  pertinent  here  have  recently  been 
put  forward  by  socially-minded  thinkers.  Miss  Vida 
Scudder,  a  leading  socialist  of  the  more  orthodox  stamp, 
has  insisted  that  the  next  step  in  the  moralization  of 
industry  is  the  preparation  of  what  she  calls  a  "white 
list"  of  investments,  to  be  patronized  by  those  anxious 
not  merely  to  make  money  but  to  see  their  money  help  on 
toward  a  better  industrial  day.  The  investments  on  the 
white  list  would  be  enterprises  living  up  to  the  best 
light  obtainable  as  to  methods  for  conducting  business 
not  only  without  social  loss  but  with  the  heaviest  gain  to 
the  community.  Another  socially-minded  leader,  pro- 
fessor in  a  prominent  theological  school,  has  suggested 
that  the  faculty  of  his  school  express  to  the  trustees  their 
conviction  that  the  funds  from  which  professors'  salaries 
are  paid  should  be  subjected  to  the  closest  scrutiny  to 
determine  the  usefulness  of  the  investments  for  the 
nobler  interests  of  Society,  and  that  the  professors  show 
themselves  willing  to  stand  any  loss  made  necessary  by 
investment  in  the  socially  better  enterprises.  It  is  only 
as  propositions  of  this  kind  are  taken  seriously  that  the 
Church  will  do  its  whole  duty  in  the  humanization  and 
Christianization  of  modem  industry. 

If  we  were  to  prepare  such  a  white  list  what  would 
be  some  of  the  requisites  upon  which  the  Church  would 
have  to  insist?    To  begin  with  it  would  have  to  put  it- 


84      CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

self  against  all  investments  yielding  a  suspiciously  large 
return.  Such  returns  are  ordinarily  the  result  of  specu- 
lation or  of  monopoly  control.  In  neither  class  of  in- 
vestments has  the  Church  a  right  to  deal.  It  is  obvious 
also  that  it  would  be  the  plain  duty  of  the  Church  to 
steer  clear  of  entanglement  in  any  anti-social  business. 
The  churchman  must  always  beware  of  the  subtle  self- 
sophistications  which  are  possible  when  questionable  in- 
vestments are  up  for  discussion.  I  once  knew  a  church 
located  near  a  famous  race-track, — the  race-track  being 
the  scene  of  the  most  notorious  betting  in  the  United 
States.  The  church  got  a  considerable  part  of  its  finan- 
cial strength  from  establishing  eating  places  to  minister 
to  the  betting  crowds.  It  was  altogether  amazing  to  see 
how  hard  it  was  to  convince  the  members  of  that  congre- 
gation that  the  evils  of  betting  on  horse  races  were  any- 
thing more  than  incidental  and  casual.  From  the  view- 
point of  these  alert  churchmen  the  important  fact  about 
horse  racing  was  that  it  improved  the  breed  of  horses. 
Of  course  it  was  proper  for  a  divine  institution  to  relieve 
the  hunger  of  those  engaged  in  such  a  commendable  voca- 
tion as  the  improvement  of  the  breed  of  horses.  An  in- 
vestigation of  the  ownership  of  some  commercial  products 
now  on  the  market,  whose  social  value  is  of  a  dubious 
qualitj^,  might  be  rather  surprising.  It  will  not  do  for 
the  Church  to  take  unqualifiedly  the  ground  that  any  and 
all  investments  which  are  legally  permissible  are  proper 
in  ecclesiastical  ethics. 

To  be  even  more  specific  the  Church  contradicts  all 
its  social  teaching  if  its  money  goes  to  keep  alive  enter- 
prises which  are  not  unquestionably  honest.  Suppose 
any  of  the  money  of  the  Church  aids  in  the  manufacture 
of  consumers'  goods,  by  which  we  mean  food  or  clothing 


THE  CHURCH  AS  INVESTOR  85 

or  shelter.  What  virtue  can  there  be  in  devoting  to  the 
cause  of  the  Lord  the  proceeds  from  the  sale  of  foods 
which  are  adulterated,  or  of  garments  which  are  shoddy, 
ol  from  the  rent  of  tenements  which  lack  adequate  air 
and  light  space?  When  we  start  on  this  course,  how- 
ever, there  seems  hardly  to  be  any  end.  If  we  are  to 
be  thorough-going  we  must  consider  the  conditions  under 
which  the  workman  performs  his  daily  task, — the  hours 
of  his  labor,  such  questions  as  double  shift  and  the  rela- 
tion of  fatigue  to  efficiency.  It  is  a  travesty  upon  the 
Gospel  itself  for  the  Church  to  invest  money  in  businesses 
which  make  it  impossible  for  the  workmen  in  those  en- 
terprises ever  to  have  a  chance  at  the  blessings  of  re- 
ligion for  themselves.  If,  however,  we  can  get  a  white 
list  of  investments — one  that  is  white  and  not  white- 
washed— a  service  can  be  rendered  present-day  industry 
by  holding  up  socially-minded  interests  to  public  ap- 
proval. 

It  may  seem  to  some  that  this  theme  is  not  worthy  of 
a  separate  chapter  but  such  criticism  is  near-sighted. 
We  spoke  in  a  previous  chapter  of  the  function  in  society 
of  those  who  spend  money.  Even  more  important  is  the 
function  of  those  who  invest  money.  The  investor  be- 
comes a  sharer  in  the  responsibility  for  the  enterprise. 
He  is  a  part  producer.  His  aid  is  sought  to  put  en- 
terprises upon  a  paying  basis.  He  is  therefore  measura- 
bly responsible  for  the  social  consequences  which  flow 
forth  from  the  enterprises  in  which  he  invests. 

We  said  at  the  beginning  that  we  had  no  expectation 
that  the  present  industrial  order  will  soon  be  so  changed 
as  to  make  unlikely  the  return  from  invested  funds. 
After  such  a  declaration  we  must  be  on  our  guard  lest 
we  forget  that  these  invested  funds  do  much  to  tie  up 


86      CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

the  Church  to  the  existing  industrial  order.  As  the  total 
of  the  accumulations  increases  we  shall  be  brought  even 
more  closely  face  to  face  with  a  peril  for  Christianity. 
The  possession  of  interest-bearing  bonds  and  of  perfectly 
legitimate  mortgages  gives  the  Church  a  stake  in  the  con- 
tinuance of  interest  producers.  One  point,  we  repeat, 
where  private  property  is  to-day  violently  attacked  is  on 
the  return  of  money  to  lenders  in  the  form  of  interest. 
Few  social  critics  now  object  to  a  man's  being  allowed 
to  accumulate  money  for  service  rendered  and  to  use 
that  money  during  his  own  lifetime  as  he  pleases.  What 
the  critics  object  to  is  such  an  accumulator's  receiving 
pay  when  he  lends  the  money.  The  shock  that  this 
criticism  gives  us  as  we  listen  to  it  shows  us  how  much 
of  a  hold  the  capitalistic  system  has  taken  on  our  minds. 
It  will  not  harm  us  to  be  occasionally  treated  to  such 
shocks. 

Christianity  places  its  emphasis  on  human  and  divine 
values.  Believing  as  we  do  that  the  Church  has  the 
right  to  a  moderate  return  from  money  invested  in  so- 
cially beneficial  enterprises,  we  would  protest  against 
this  right's  being  so  used  as  to  check  debate  on  the  vir- 
tues or  vices  of  the  present  industrial  order.  One  glory 
of  Christianity  has  been  that  it  has  developed  an  atmos- 
phere in  which  all  such  themes  could  be  freely  discussed. 
Sad  will  be  the  day  for  the  Church  if  property  rights 
attain  to  priority  over  human  rights.  The  Church  is 
only  safe  with  great  resources  in  its  possession  when  it 
recognizes  the  dangers  implicit  in  that  possession.  Let 
not  any  one  cry  out  against  such  a  study  of  dangers. 
One  preventive  against  devastating  revolution  is  the 
elimination  of  abuses  which  make  for  revolution.  The 
only  way  to  correct  evils  is  to  see  them  as  they  are.     I 


THE  CHURCH  AS  INVESTOR  87 

am  not  a  Socialist,  but  I  believe  that  the  most  pungent 
criticism  of  capitalism  comes  from  the  socialists.  It  is 
ignorant  and  unchristian  foolhardiness  not  to  listen  to 
mch  criticism. 

And  by  the  way,  speaking  of  socialism,  it  will  not  be 
very  effective  to  declaim  against  the  manifold  and  serious 
weakness  of  state  socialism  as  long  as  the  present  capital- 
istic system  is  open  to  like  attack  at  the  same  points.  I 
do  not  think  that  socialism  of  the  thorough-going  variety 
has  ever  yet  met  the  question  as  to  its  effect  on  family 
life ;  but  with  low  ideals  of  the  family  at  one  end  of  the 
present  social  scale,  and  with  no  opportunity  for  true 
family  conditions  at  the  other  our  criticism  of  socialism 
is  estopped  in  advance.  It  is  doubtful  if  a  state  social- 
istic scheme  would  fully  call  out  the  extraordinary  tal- 
ents of  individuals,  but  with  so  much  potential  ability 
smothered  by  the  present  order  we  are  prevented  from 
taking  advantage  of  this  criticism.  There  seems  to  me 
no  way  to  eradicate  from  socialism  the  possibilities  of 
vested  interests  even  if  they  might  not  be  financial — 
nepotisms,  personal  pulls  and  all  that  evil  brood — but 
this  arouses  the  rejoinder — would  they  be  any  worse  than 
those  of  capitalism?  "What  about  free  speech  under  so- 
cialism ?  Would  the  publication  of  anti-socialistic  books 
be  possible  or  permissible?  And  the  socialist  mocks  us 
with, — What  about  free  speech  now?  And  what  of  the 
Malthusian  possibility  that  under  the  assumed  prosperity 
of  socialism,  with  the  prudential  check  of  the  fathers' 
having  to  care  for  the  children  removed,  the  race  may 
so  increase  as  to  bring  horrible  pressure  on  food  supply  ? 
Here  the  socialist  rails  at  us  with  bitter  laughter,  point- 
ing to  labor  conditions  in  which  under  capitalism  heed- 
less and  dejected  masses  simply  spawn  up  to  the  limit 


88      CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

of  the  strength  of  the  women.  "When  socially-minded 
economists  like  Alfred  Marshall,  one  of  the  greatest 
thinkers  of  our  time,  quietly  reminds  the  socialists  that 
to  rush  past  difficulties  in  the  path  of  reform  is  not  to 
solve  them,  the  socialists  shout  forth  the  urgency  of 
human  needs.  No !  socialism  has  never  yet  heeded 
searching  scrutiny  simply  because  it  is  so  easy  for  the 
socialist  to  point  scornfully  at  faults  in  the  existing  or- 
der against  which  the  critic  warns  in  socialism.  The 
best  tactic  for  capitalism  in  the  fight  with  extreme  so- 
cialism is  to  hearken  to  the  criticism  of  socialism  upon 
capitalism. 

The  peril  in  handling  huge  funds  is  that  of  becoming 
capitalistically  minded.  It  may  seem  odd,  even  funny, 
to  fancy  that  a  group  of  men — no  one  of  whom  has  him- 
self a  salary  of  more  than  six-thousand  dollars  a  year — 
are  at  all  likely  to  influence  the  Church  by  being  capital- 
istically minded.  These  men  by  the  very  seriousness  of 
their  responsibilities  are  likely  to  be  scrupulously  and 
painstakingly  honest.  They  announce  themselves  as 
committed  to  most  conservative  management.  Yet  just 
here  is  the  peril, — the  fear  of  losing  a  little  money  in 
running  a  risk  for  a  human  value.  There  can  be  no 
question  as  to  the  unselfishness  of  the  investing  agents 
themselves.  The  modern  business  world,  however,  has 
its  own  code  of  ethics, — rules  and  maxims  and  unwritten 
order.  Paradoxical  as  it  may  sound,  the  close  observance 
of  these  rules  may  link  the  Church  up  with  a  system 
which  is  not  squarely  in  harmony  with  the  Gospel  of 
Jesus.  The  Church  may  conceivably  be  called  upon  to 
entertain  propositions  which  may  not  be  popular  in  the 
business  world.  The  trustees  of  the  Church  funds  hear 
such  policies  discussed  by  the  men  of  the  world.     There 


THE  CHURCH  AS  INVESTOR  89 

is  no  question  of  wrong  intent  on  anybody's  part, — none 
of  the  money  is  to  go  to  anybody's  private  pocket, — but 
the  atmosphere  generated  by  some  such  discussion  is  not 
that  which  makes  for  freedom  in  the  consideration  of 
measures  having  to  do  with  vital  human  and  spiritual 
interests.  There  are  some  things  in  this  world  which  do 
not  naturally  belong  together.  There  was  a  sound  in- 
sight in  the  Old  Testament  which  made  it  evident  that 
David  was  not  the  fit  person  to  build  the  Temple  be- 
cause he  had  been  so  much  a  man  of  war.  So  far  as  we 
recall  no  prophet  condemned  David's  w^ars  in  the  Old 
Testament  days,  but  there  was  something  incongruous  in 
the  very  idea  of  a  warrior's  building  the  Temple.  We 
do  not  intend  to  suggest  any  inescapable  likeness  be- 
tween modern  business  and  war, — though  something 
could  be  said  for  such  a  resemblance.  We  hazard  the 
guess  that  the  atmosphere  of  the  present-day  stock  market 
is  not  irresistibly  conducive  to  the  mood  of  prayer. 

All  this  to  one  side,  however,  it  is  the  very  legitimacy 
of  many  financial  connections  that  creates  a  peril  for 
the  Church.  If  Church  wealth  had  not  come  as  gifts,  out 
of  a  spirit  of  self-sacrifice,  or  if  it  were  not  invested  in 
enterprises  so  proper  in  themselves  the  danger  might  be 
less.  It  is  possible  to  make  an  argument  for  an  entire 
social  system  on  the  basis  of  some  obviously  excellent  fea- 
tures of  that  sj^stem.  And  these  excellent  features  do 
tend  to  rivet  the  Church  to  one  type  of  industrial  order. 
It  requires  skillful  leadership  when  a  system  of  many 
outstanding  excellences  is  under  fire  to  prevent  a  Church 
which  has  connections  with  that  system  from  identifying 
with  the  system  itself  the  human  and  spiritual  standards 
for  which  the  Church  exists.  Good  as  many  features  of 
the  social  order  of  any  day  may  be  these  features  are 


90      CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

after  all  but  secondary  to  the  main  purpose  for  which 
the  Church  is  here.  The  only  basis  on  which  we  may 
safely  grant  to  organizational  church  groups  the  measure 
of  autonomy  which  we  to-day  concede,  is  that  the  merely 
organizational  features  shall  be  kept  so  firmly  in  tne 
instrumental  category  that  the  Church  can  conceivably 
make  its  adjustment  to  a  changed  order,  especially  an 
order  changed  for  the  better,  without  loss  of  precious 
months  or  years.  The  Church  should  be  one  of  the  con- 
servative forces  in  that  it  should  hold  back  Society  from 
slipping  away  from  the  human  ideals.  It  should  not  be 
conservative  in  being  so  tied  up  to  any  industrial  scheme 
that  that  connection  itself  will  by  a  hair's  weight  limit 
the  freedom  of  the  Church  in  enforcing  the  Christian 
program.  If  it  is  dangerous  to  have  the  Church  too 
closely  dependent  on  the  State,  no  matter  how  excellent 
the  State  may  be,  it  is  more  dangerous  to  have  the 
Church  too  closely  identified  even  with  the  excellent  fea- 
tures of  an  industrial  and  social  order.  Property  rights, 
even  if  the  rights  are  in  properties  legitimately  earned 
and  used,  must  not  make  too  much  of  an  argument  for 
themselves  as  over  against  human  rights. 


CHAPTER  VII 

THE   CHURCH   AS  EMPLOYER 

"We  must  next  consider  the  Church  as  an  employer  of 
human  agents  through  whom  it  does  its  work.  The  treat- 
ment naturally  divides  itself  into  two  parts,  the  relation 
of  the  Church  to  its  own  ministers  and  teachers,  and  to 
its  other  distinctively  religious  workers ;  and  the  relation 
to  the  increasing  hundreds  of  laborers  who  carry  on  the 
activities  required  by  the  Church  in  its  capacity  as  owner 
of  productive  properties. 

The  argument  is  often  urged  against  any  elaborate 
discussion  of  remuneration  to  the  distinctively  religious 
agents  of  the  Church  that  the  Church  is  under  no  ob- 
ligation to  pay  these  workers  according  to  the  scales  or 
standards  observed  in  the  business  world.  Christian 
service,  according  to  this  notion,  is  self-sacrifice,  and  all 
notion  of  adequate  pay  as  the  world  thinks  of  adequacy, 
is  out  of  place.  Now  there  is  indeed  a  sense,  as  we  shall 
soon  indicate,  in  which  the  Church  should  not  observe 
too  strictly  the  so-called  business  standards.  To  urge, 
however,  that  Christian  sacrifice  implies  that  preachers 
and  teachers  and  nurses  and  visitors  of  the  poor  are  to 
be  underpaid  is  somewhat  to  miss  the  inner  secret  of  the 
New  Testament  doctrine  of  cross-bearing.  The  central 
idea  in  the  New  Testament  is  that  work  is  not  to  be  per- 
formed with  a  selfish  intent,  or  with  emphasis  on  gain 
for  one's  self.  The  Church  must,  indeed,  guard  against 
the  possibility  of  even  the  unintentional  creation  of  posts 
of  worldly  privilege.     Ministers,  priests,  bishops,  presi- 

91 


92      CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

dents,  secretaries, — whatever  the  title,  all  must  hold  place 
without  any  claim  whatsoever  except  that  of  efficient 
service.  But  this  efficiency  is  ill-important.  In  its 
dealing  with  its  workers,  even  if  it  does  not  think  over- 
much of  the  welfare  of  the  workers  themselves,  the 
Church  must  give  heed  to  the  effectiveness  with  which 
they  discharge  their  tasks. 

In  some  ears  the  word  ''effectiveness"  has  a  secular 
sound.  If  necessary  we  can  use  some  other  word;  the 
only  question  is  whether  the  work  of  the  Church  shall 
be  done  well  or  ill.  Even  if  the  Church  could  be  justi- 
fied, as  certainly  it  cannot  be,  in  maintaining  that  Chris- 
tian sacrifice  implies  that  it  is  to  pay  scant  attention  to 
the  workers  so  far  as  their  own  personal  welfare  is  con- 
cerned, the  Church  could  never  be  justified  for  not  so 
treating  its  servants  as  to  help  them  to  success  in  their 
service. 

Glance  for  a  moment  at  the  proposal  in  many  denom- 
inations to  bestow  pensions  on  ministers  and  teachers 
who  have  given  their  best  years  to  religious  occupations. 
With  some  arguments  in  behalf  of  such  pensioning  the 
churchman  becomes  impatient.  He  may  not  have  kept 
close  enough  to  the  modern  social  drift  to  see  that  pen- 
sions are  simple  justice  toward  the  workers  themselves. 
But  there  is  another  angle  of  view.  One  stimulus  to 
successful  work  is  the  possibility  of  casting  one's  self 
wholly  into  a  task  without  worry  for  the  future.  If 
the  worker  feels  that  in  the  days  to  come,  when  his 
strength  has  lessened,  the  Church  will  make  provision 
for  him  so  that  he  need  not  trouble  himself  over  per- 
sonal cares  his  power  is  increased.  It  is  all  very  fine 
for  the  Church  to  praise  the  men  who  can  throw  them- 
selves wholly  into  their  tasks;  but  it  must  do  its  part 


THE  CHURCH  AS  EMPLOYER  93 

to  make  siicli  self-forgetfulness  possible.  Mankind  will 
likely  not  be  saved  except  by  such  abandon.  Here  is 
something  of  the  secret  of  the  hold  of  the  Roman  Cath- 
olic organization  on  its  servants, — and  something  of  the 
secret  also  of  the  self-abandonment  itself  with  which 
those  servants  do  their  work.  It  is  true  that  through 
the  vows  of  celibacy  the  Roman  priests  are  forbidden  to 
take  on  themselves  family  cares,  but  even  so,  some  of 
the  efficiency  of  the  priests  lies  in  their  knowledge  that 
the  Church  will  always  care  for  them.  There  is  an 
obligation  on  every  denomination  to  make  it  possible 
for  religious  workers  to  plunge  completely  into  their 
tasks. 

But  there  is  a  problem  prior  to  this  of  providing  for 
the  workers'  old  age, — the  problem  of  the  best  training 
of  the  workers  of  the  Church  for  their  fields.  Here 
again  there  is  some  force  in  the  argument  that  the 
Church  should  not  spend  largely  just  to  give  ministers 
the  advantages  of  scholarly  culture.  The  ideal  servant 
of  the  Church  finds  joy  in  service  itself.  He  has  abund- 
ant opportunity,  indeed,  to  explore  the  world  of  books 
and  the  world  of  men  as  others  do  not.  The  enjoyment 
of  such  privileges  throws  upon  the  minister  heavy  re- 
sponsibility, but  the  Church  does  not  open  doors  to  these 
privileges  just  for  the  benefit  of  the  worker  himself. 
The  aim  is  to  get  the  work  done.  It  is  much  the  fashion 
in  this  pragmatic  day  to  disparage  the  more  strictly 
intellectual  training,  but  it  is  noticeable  that  the  prag- 
matists  themselves  develop  to  the  utmost  whatever  brain 
powers  they  possess,  for  the  sake  of  showing  that  brain 
power  is  not  the  chief  path  to  knowledge.  In  the  ages 
covered  by  the  Scriptural  revelation  stress  was  laid  upon 
training  by  study  and  reflection  as  a  serious  response  to 


94      CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

a  divine  call.  The  equipment  was,  of  course,  not  al- 
ways in  the  schools,  but  in  one  exercise  or  another  proph- 
ets and  apostles  and  seers  learned  how  to  think.  Cor- 
rect thinking  does  not  come  by  nature,  but  by  the  most 
rigorous  self-discipline, — self-discipline  from  which 
Jesus  and  Paul  were  not  exempt.  The  minister  of  God 
who  undertakes  to  explain  God  to  men  should,  with  all 
due  allowance  for  exceptions,  be  the  mind  of  most  ex- 
tensive general  culture  in  the  community.  While  it  is 
entirely  possible  for  the  spirit  of  God  to  speak  through 
the  lips  of  uncultivated  and  ignorant  disciples,  the  spirit 
of  God  seldom  does  so  speak.  It  is  true  that  Jesus  chose 
his  disciples  outside  the  formal  schools  of  his  day  but  it 
also  is  true  that  he  insisted  that  they  go  to  school  to 
himself.  Frequently  we  hear  protests  agains  a  stern 
mental  regimen  for  Christian  workers  on  the  ground 
that  Jesus  chose  his  lieutenants  from  among  unlettered 
fishermen.  The  protest  sometimes  seems  to  assume  that 
the  disciples  were  at  the  beginning  ignoramuses,  utterly 
forgetting  that  a  man  cannot  be  much  of  a  fisherman 
and  much  of  an  ignoramus  at  the  same  time.  Jesus 
chose  the  men  who  had  lived  close  to  the  elementary 
factors  of  nature  and  of  life,  and  then  pressed  them  to 
the  severity  of  his  own  spiritual  discipline. 

Before  those  who  leap  to  an  opposite  extreme  and 
speak  as  if  the  disciples  at  the  start  were  wise  enough  to 
go  forth  as  Christian  teachers,  we  place  the  long  months 
of  training  which  Jesus  gave  his  disciples,  and  we  point 
out  that  the  recorded  utterances  of  the  disciples  before 
their  training  was  complete  are  significant  mostly  as 
revelations  of  the  enormity  of  the  task  before  the 
Teacher.  The  training  of  Jesus  for  himself  and  for  his 
disciples  was  long  and  hard.     The  story  of  the  tempta- 


THE  CHUKCH  AS  EMPLOYER  95 

tion  of  the  Master  implies  that  the  suggested  programs 
as  to  messianic  procedure  were  considered  on  their  merit, 
and  repulsed  not  by  impulse  or  by  sentiment  but  by 
earnest  thought.  To  what  were  the  years  of  Paul  which 
first  followed  his  conversion  devoted?  Did  Paul  retire 
into  the  desert  solely  for  physical  recuperation?  Did 
he  not  set  himself  at  least  through  parts  of  three  years 
to  the  strain  of  tense  wrestling  with  intellectual  as  well 
as  spiritual  difficulties? 

The  Church  has  a  right  by  high  spiritual  eminent  do- 
main to  claim  for  its  service  the  ablest  intellects  whom  it 
can  reach  for  service  in  all  fields.  But  if  the  power  of 
its  servants  is  to  be  chiefly  intellectual  they  would  better 
remain  in  the  spheres  where  that  power  can  be  most 
completely  developed,  unless  the  Church  is  prepared  to 
utilize  trained  minds  to  the  utmost.  Which  is  better  for 
Society,  a  skilled  surgeon  laboring  for  the  Church  with 
imperfect  instruments,  or  remaining  in  private  practice 
and  working  with  the  best  that  Society  can  supply 
to  an  expert  of  the  most  adequate  training?  The 
proper  answer  is  that  the  Church  should  stand  for  the 
finest  training  and  the  amplest  opportunities  at  the  same 
time  that  it  bestows  upon  the  surgeon  an  impulse  and  a 
dynamic  which  may  never  fully  appear  in  private  prac- 
tice. 

The  Church  must  not  trifle  with  brains.  They  are  too 
scarce.  I  was  once  meeting  in  interviews  the  students 
of  a  foremost  university  who  were  considering  fields  of 
life  work.  A  young  man  came  forward  who  had  shown 
astonishing  knack  in  the  investigation  of  the  ductless 
glands  of  the  human  body.  He  had  been  deeply  im- 
pressed by  the  appeal  of  some  Christian  recruiting  agent 
who  had  declared  to  him  that  it  was  his  duty  to  abandon 


96      CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

glands  for  theology.  Assuming  that  the  young  student 
was  gifted  for  such  important  scientific  research  the 
ideal  message  of  the  Church  for  him  would  have  been 
that  it  had  unparalleled  fields  for  just  the  service  which 
he  could  render;  that  it  was  prepared  at  whatever  cost 
to  make  his  service  of  the  best.  If  this  could  not 
honestly  be  said  he  should  have  been  urged  to  carry  his 
talents  wherever  they  would  have  suitable  opportunity. 

The  Kingdom  of  God  and  of  Humanity  is  to-day  so 
in  need  of  specialized  intellectual  power  that  in  some 
cases  everything  else  should  give  way  before  an  oppor- 
tunity for  the  exercise  of  that  definite  extraordinary 
ability.  Would  it  have  been  right  for  the  Church  to 
say  to  such  a  volunteer  as  the  above,  * '  Go  to  a  theological 
school;  take  the  courses  there  and  then  enter  into  the 
routine  of  the  ministry"?  Not  unless  the  candidate 
showed  signs  of  an  ability  for  the  ministry  at  least  equal 
to  those  he  showed  for  science.  It  is  the  duty  of  the 
Church  to  help  station  brain  power  where  it  can  work 
best. 

In  all  this  it  must  be  remembered  that  the  Church 
must  not  carry  over  into  its  estimate  of  its  workers 
every  standard  that  rules  in  the  business  world.  The 
same  persons  who  often  insist  that  church  work  is  self- 
sacrificing  service  will  often  likewise  insist  that  strictly 
business  standards  be  applied  to  the  Christian  worker's 
accomplishment.  The  Church  cannot  excuse  loose  and 
slovenly  workmanship,  but  there  are  some  business 
standards  which  are  distinctively  out  of  place  in  spiritual 
enterprises. 

A  number  of  years  ago  an  energetic  educational  board 
tried  to  set  up  scales  for  intellectual  energies  in  the 
colleges  and  universities  of  this  country.     The  problem 


THE  CHURCH  AS  EMPLOYER  97 

was  handled  so  mechanically  through  reliance  upon  time 
schedules  and  units  of  measurement  as  quickly  to  bring 
the  scheme  into  ridicule.  Rules  for  creative  excellence 
cannot  be  phrased  exactly.  This  is  even  more  true  with 
spiritual  than  with  academic  leadership.  Creative 
power  arises  out  of  long  hours  of  patient  brooding,  ut- 
terly untrammeled  by  scheduled  formulas.  To  an  ex- 
tent, to  be  sure,  a  church  can  be  run  as  a  business.  But 
the  requirements  of  the  business  routine  must  halt  at 
the  door  of  the  prophet's  study.  So  of  estimating  a 
prophet's  worth  by  stati^ical  outcome..  While  it  is 
highly  suspicious  if  a  minister  or  teacher  toils  on  through 
years  with  no  statistical  result,  nevertheless  the  emphasis 
on  statistics  as  such  is  deadly  for  lofty  prophetic  utter- 
ance. If  the  accounts  of  the  ministry  of  Jesus  in  the 
New  Testament  are  at  all  complete  some  items  must  be 
disconcerting  to  the  lovers  of  figures.  There  was  a  lack 
of  follow-up  methods  in  the  preaching  of  Jesus.  It 
would  have  been  distressing  for  the  statistical  church- 
man to  have  heard  the  Master  conclude  his  parables  with 
the  abrupt  word:  ''He  that  hath  ears  to  hear,  let  him 
hear";  and  then  to  have  seen  him  pass  on  without  stop- 
ping to  appoint  a  committee  to  conserve  results. 

It  is  impossible  for  the  Church  to  enter  far  into  en- 
terprises which  involve  the  investment  of  millions  of 
dollars  without  an  inevitable  increase  in  secretarial  and 
bureau  officials.  These  officials  are  indispensable,  but 
they  are  prone  to  exaggerate  their  own  importance  as 
compared  with  that  of  the  men  who  are  set  apart  to  be 
the  prophets  of  the  Church.  The  layman  who  is  him- 
self successful  in  secular  business  is  not  nearly  so  likely 
to  judge  a  preacher  by  an  artificial  business  criterion  as 
is  a  Church  bureaucrat  in  charge  of  an  organizational 


98       CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

enterprise.  In  a  recent  campaign  for  immense  funds 
in  one  of  the  important  denominations  of  the  country, 
the  secretarial  force  at  the  head  of  the  campaign  sketched 
out  a  program  of  themes  which  the  preachers  were  to 
discuss  through  a  period  of  four  months.  If  the  preach- 
ers had  followed  the  scheme  they  would  have  spoken 
once  every  Sunday  and  once  every  midweek  for  four 
months  on  themes  suggested  by  practically  secular  or- 
ganizational officials.  That  many  preachers  of  rather 
moderate  intellectual  capital  were  grateful  for  such  help 
should  not  blind  any  one's  eyes  to  the  tendency  of 
secretarial  functions  of  this  sort  to  strike  at  the  heart  of 
living  prophecy  in  the  Church.  Inevitably  the  officials 
of  a  bureau  come  to  appraise  the  utterances  of  preachers 
by  some  statistically  tangible  harvest.  There  is  matter 
for  serious  reflection  in  the  fact  that  the  greatest  Ameri- 
can preachers  are  less  often  found  in  the  pulpits  of  the 
highly  centralized  denominations  than  in  those  of  more 
independent  congregational  organization.  Could  Horace 
Bushnell  or  Henry  Ward  Beecher  or  Phillips  Brooks  have 
worked  easily  under  tightly  centralized  control  ? 

Beyond  all  this  is  the  absolute  necessity  upon  the 
Church  of  allowing  a  preacher  to  speak  his  mind  on  the 
important  social  questions  of  the  day.  To  the  credit 
of  the  Christian  churches  it  must  be  said  that  the  at- 
tempts at  direct  repression  of  free  speech  in  pulpits  have 
been  very  few,  when  the  number  of  pulpits  in  the  land 
is  taken  into  consideration.  But  there  is  altogether 
too  much  repression  by  indirection, — questioning  the 
judgment  of  the  speaker,  or  damning  him  with  faint 
praise.  Whether  the  devotees  of  modern  business  meth- 
ods can  make  anything  of  it  or  not  the  obligation  is  upon 
the  Christian  Church  to  see  that  the  prophet  has  his 


THE  CHURCH  AS  EMPLOYER  99 

chance.  If  this  is  not  granted  the  spirit  of  prophecy 
finds  utterance  outside  the  Church.  We  may  not  know 
much  about  the  Almighty's  plans  for  the  uplift  of  the 
world  but  we  can  be  perfectly  sure  that  He  does  not 
intend  to  leave  Himself  without  a  witness.  The  pro- 
phet's voice  must  be  heard  above  all  the  clicking  of  the 
typewriters  of  secretaries  and  treasurers. 

It  is  possible  for  the  Church,  by  too  much  considering 
secular  points  of  view,  to  make  itself  the  dupe  and  tool 
of  self-centered  business  interests.  We  have  no  desire  to 
be  harsh,  but  some  such  interests  seldom  speak  forth  their 
underlying  reason  for  action.  As  an  instance,  think  of 
the  denunciation  of  the  Bolshevist  system  of  Russia  by 
commercial  leaders  a  few  months  ago.  The  emphasis  was 
on  Bolshevism's  alleged  attacks  upon  religion  and  the 
family  and  the  moral  basis  of  Society.  Stirred  by  pic- 
tures of  Society's  peril  churchmen  waxed  fiercely  elo- 
quent and  business  leaders  applauded :  the  eloquence  and 
the  applause,  it  must  be  confessed,  frequently  varying  in- 
versely with  the  exactness  of  the  knowledge  of  the  Russian 
enigma.  The  course  of  events  seems  to  be  quieting  the 
fears  of  many  business  men  as  to  the  loss  of  money  in- 
vested in  Russia ;  and  when  it  becomes  possible  to  enter 
into  trade  with  Bolshevism  much  Business  will  be  ready. 
We  are  certainly  not  arguing  against  trade  with  Russia, 
but  what  of  the  influence  of  Bolshevism  on  the  Family 
and  the  State  and  the  Church?  Church  officials  who 
blaze  out  against  Bolshevism  may  find  Commerce  and 
Finance  lukewarm  or  cold  as  soon  as  Business  enters  into 
paying  commerce  with  Russia.  This  does  not  mean  dia- 
bolical cunning  on  the  part  of  the  commercial  agents  but 
it  does  suggest  the  wisdom  of  not  leaning  too  heavily  on 
such  backers  for  steady  support  of  a  moral  truth,  or  per- 


100      CHUBCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

haps  of  not  leaping  too  precipitately  to  the  side  of  Busi- 
ness when  Business  poses  as  a  moral  crusader. 

The  second  part  of  this  chapter  has  to  do  with  the 
employment  of  labor  by  Church  enterprises.  If  any  one 
thinks  that  this  is  an  item  of  slight  importance  let  him 
remember  that  the  greater  American  denominations  all 
have  publishing  houses, — with  a  total  volume  of  busi- 
ness reaching  many  millions  a  year.  The  sincerity  of  the 
professions  of  the  Church  toward  the  welfare  of  labor  is 
revealed  by  the  attitude  of  Church  toward  labor  in  such 
enterprises.  Inasmuch  as  there  is  no  absolute  standard 
that  can  govern  all  specific  cases  the  policy  of  the  Church 
should  be  to  keep  its  labor  program  as  advanced  as  pos- 
sible. Only  thus  can  the  Church  do  its  part  in  making 
dynamically  effective  the  unselfish  motives  in  industry. 
If  such  motives  are  not  made  effective  even  material  pro- 
duction begins  to  fall  off.  If  the  Church  wishes  to  bind 
the  labor  world  to  the  ideal  of  service  let  it  show  itself 
ready  to  serve  the  labor  world. 

Everywhere  to-day  we  hear  utterances  in  favor  of  col- 
lective bargaining.  If  the  Church  sincerely  believes  in 
collective  bargaining  the  place  to  avow  her  belief  is  in  her 
own  bargains  with  her  laborers.  The  most  familiar 
form  of  collective  bargaining  is  through  trade  unions. 
We  do  not  pretend  to  enter  a  sweeping  endorsement  of 
labor-unions.  Many  of  them  have  been  guilty  of  grave 
mistakes.  But  any  man  who  has  eyes  open  to  the  history 
of  labor  knows  that  about  all  the  improvement  which 
has  been  made  anywhere  in  labor  conditions  has  come 
through  the  campaigns  of  the  labor-unions.  The  con- 
tempt of  the  trade-unionist  for  the  scab  is  hard  to  com- 
prehend, unless  we  think  of  the  trade-union  as  fighting 
the  battle  for  all  grades  of  labor,  non-union  as  well  as 


THE  CHURCH  AS  EMPLOYER  101 

union.  The  non-unionist  eats  of  the  fruits  of  the  victory 
of  the  trade-union  without  paying  any  of  the  cost  of  the 
victory.  We  cannot  restrain  something  of  the  same  feel- 
ing for  the  non-union  laborer  who  fights  against  union 
labor  that  we  have  for  a  citizen  in  the  community  who 
will  never  give  to  a  Church  enterprise,  but  who  readily 
avails  himself  of  all  the  advantages  which  come  into  the 
community  through  the  moral  effectiveness  of  the 
Church.  A  certain  anti-union  employer  in  charge  of  a 
big  business  used  to  pride  himself  on  the  fact  that  while 
he  would  not  at  all  recognize  unionism,  he  gave  his  em- 
ployees all  the  privileges  as  to  hours  and  wages  which 
union  men  received.  It  is  not  recorded  that  he  ever  ran 
in  advance  of  the  union  in  the  bestowal  of  such  privileges. 
His  employees,  indeed,  were  even  encouraged  to  hold 
their  heads  high,  as  over  against  union  members,  but  they 
were  enjoying  the  fruits  of  the  struggle  of  the  members  of 
the  unions. 

It  must  be  admitted  that  unions  at  times  have  been 
brutal.  They  have  resorted  to  force  when  there  has 
been  not  the  slightest  justification  for  force.  They  have 
put  through  coercive  measures  in  contradiction  to  a 
spirit  of  liberty.  Their  leaders  have  declared  industrial 
wars  without  sufficiently  counting  the  cost.  But  when 
all  is  said  the  unions  have  fought  a  battl#  for  human 
rights  and  have  pushed  the  world  on  toward  better  con- 
ditions for  the  laboring  masses  everywhere.  Most  flour- 
ishes by  churchmen  about  standing  against  unions  to 
preserve  the  liberty  of  the  individual  laborer  are  based 
on  sheer  ignorance.  The  only  expedient  by  which  the 
individual  laborer  can  be  secure  in  his  liberties  is  through 
cooperation  with  his  fellows.  We  do  not  pretend  to  say 
just  what  form  collective  bargaining  should  take  in  this 


102       CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

or  that  trade,  for  unionism  is  not  the  only  form,  but  we 
do  say  that  if  any  question  in  social  theory  is  closed 
it  is  the  question  as  to  collective  bargaining.  To  ask 
whether  a  man  should  have  a  right  to  join  an  associa- 
tion of  his  fellow  laborers  to  help  on  the  cause  of 
labor  is  about  as  rational  as  to  ask  whether  a  man  should 
have  a  right  to  join  a  church  to  help  on  the  cause  of  the 
Kingdom  of  God.  There  may  be  situations  in  which  one 
should  not  bind  oneself  to  a  collective  group  of  laborers, 
or  of  religionists.  But  in  the  main  the  principle  of  col- 
lective action  holds  good  in  both  fields.  In  dealing  with 
this  issue  it  would  be  a  help  if  all  who  are  in  positions 
of  responsibility  would  inform  themselves  more  fully  as 
to  the  history  of  gains  for  humanity  made  by  labor  as- 
sociations in  spite  of  the  lukewarmness  and  even  the 
hostility  of  the  Church.  It  is  an  encouraging  sign  that 
the  Church  is  so  markedly  changing  its  attitude  toward 
the  forces  at  work  in  the  labor  world. 

In  meeting  with  the  laborer  the  Church  official  will  do 
well  to  avoid  anything  savoring  of  patronizing  con- 
descension. That  the  Church  is  engaged  in  a  holy  and 
sacred  task  does  not  give  it  the  right  to  patronize  any- 
body. In  spite  of  all  mistakes  in  the  past  the  Church 
to-day  is  not  suffering  from  direct  hostility  to  the  la- 
borer. It  is,  however,  afflicted  somewhat  with  paternal- 
ism,— that  middle  stage  between  hostility  to  the  laboring 
classes  and  respectful  cooperation  with  them.  But 
paternalism  is  not  a  Christian  attitude  except  toward 
children.  Paternalism  is  often  more  offensive  to  an  in- 
dependent laborer  than  is  outright  warfare.  I  once 
visited  the  plant  of  a  huge  manufacturing  concern  which 
never  welcomed  any  suggestion  or  approach  from  its 
laborers  for  any  reason  whatsoever.     The  employing  cor- 


THE  CHURCH  AS  EMPLOYER  103 

poration  thought  of  itself  as  exceedingly  humane  because 
it  had  built  a  spacious  dining-hall  in  which  the  men 
might  eat  the  lunches  that  their  wives  brought  to  them 
at  the  noon  hour.  For  some  perverse  reason  the  men 
preferred  to  eat  on  the  curbstones  rather  than  to  accept 
the  benevolence  of  the  corporation.  The  manufacturers 
declared  that  they  were  almost  without  hope  of  ever 
Americanizing  these  workers.  If  they  had  known  any- 
thing about  Americanism  they  would  have  recognized 
that  unwillingness  to  accept  favors  from  the  hands  of  a 
patronizing  institution  was  a  good  first  step  toward 
Americanization, — at  least  it  was  a  step  toward  a  gen- 
uinely Christian  independence.  And  there  is  about 
paternalism  a  tendency  to  quick  descent  to  some  forms 
of  industrial  meanness  when  the  size  of  a  plant  so 
increases  as  to  make  personal  contact  between  employer 
and  employed  impossible:  for  example,  the  open  ear  to 
tattlers  and  tale-bearers  and  the  use  of  informers. 

Independence,  self-respect,  self-determination,  loyalty 
to  an  ideal  of  service, — these  are  the  Christian  virtues 
which  the  Church  ought  to  foster  in  all  its  contact  with 
the  laboring  man.  In  this  sphere  the  Church  must  not 
too  boldly  set  itself  up  to  judge  what  is  good  for  the 
laboring  man  apart  from  the  judgment  of  the  man  him- 
self. One  of  the  inherent  weaknesses  of  a  religious  in- 
stitution is  its  proneness  to  make  claim  for  a  special 
authority  in  realms  where  more  secular  agencies  have 
equal  right  to  an  opinion.  The  Church  is  commissioned 
to  stand  uncompromisingly  for  the  human  values. 
Among  those  values  is  freedom — and  it  is  absurd  to 
think  that  a  Church  can  tell  a  mass  of  laborers  what  their 
freedom  calls  for.  If  they  are  free  they  will  do  the 
calling.     The  Church  has,  indeed,  a  right  to  its  opinion 


104       CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

on  any  proposed  industrial  changes;  it  has  a  right  to 
its  own  freedom  as  over  against  the  compulsion  of  any 
group, — capitalists  or  laborers.  But  this  means  that  in 
the  end  all  groups  must  meet  on  the  basis  of  mutual  re- 
spect and  talk  things  through.  And  this  justifies  posi- 
tions on  controlling  boards  of  church  manufacturing 
enterprises  for  representatives  of  labor  chosen  by  the 
laborers  themselves. 

The  Church  must  be  much  on  its  guard  against  its 
leaders  who  make  for  it  claims  of  authority  of  any 
arbitrary  sort  when  they  are  handling  a  labor  problem. 
The  lamentable  truth  is  that  to-day  the  labor  world  in 
general  looks  upon  the  Church  as  its  foe.  The  Church 
is  not  nearly  so  hostile  as  the  labor  world  imagines.  It 
is  certainly  not  more  ignorant  about  Labor  than  is  La- 
bor about  the  Church:  and  it  is  doing  much  to  work 
away  from  the  mood  of  noisy  authoritativeness  and  into 
the  mood  of  quiet  influence.  This,  of  course,  brings  the 
problem  around  to  the  necessity  of  the  give-and-take  of 
open  discussion  in  a  democratic  community.  A  most  de- 
cisive factor  in  increasing  the  influence  of  the  Church 
will  be  just  its  willingness  to  treat  its  own  laborers  ac- 
cording to  the  most  advanced  standards  which  it  can 
agree  upon  in  face-to-face  discussion  with  them.  That 
it  is  a  Church  and  that  it  makes  no  profits  for  itself  does 
not  relieve  it  from  the  responsibility  of  going  just  as  far 
as  is  possible  under  the  present  system  to  grant  its 
workers  the  terms  which  make  for  self-determination  by 
those  workers  themselves.  Advanced  economic  theory 
uttered  in  resolutions  by  religious  conferences  and  as- 
semblies is  good  for  the  enlightenment  of  the  church 
constituency,  but  economic  practice  is  the  only  thing  that 
counts  with  the  labor  world. 


CHAPTER  VIII 

MISSIONARY   EFFORT  AND   FINANCIAL  POLICY 

Within  the  past  half-dozen  years  the  missionary  plans 
for  carrying  the  Gospel  to  non-Christian  nations  have 
taken  on  immensely  enlarged  scope.  The  World  War 
itself  has  done  something  to  open  the  eyes  of  Chris- 
tendom to  the  urgency  of  a  serious  attempt  to  save  the 
whole  world.  Moreover  the  proposal  for  a  League  of 
Nations,  especially  with  its  provisions  for  mandatories 
by  the  so-called  more  favored  nations  over  the  less  fav- 
ored, has  lent  new  meaning  to  a  trusteeship  on  the  part 
of  Christendom  for  non-Christendom.  Again,  the  sheer 
size  of  the  present  plans  has  brought  the  captains  of 
unified  church  movements  into  such  close  touch  with 
captains  in  political  and  financial  circles  that  the  re- 
ligious leaders  are  now  talking  with  the  same  sweep  of 
terms  as  the  political  and  industrial  magnates. 

In  general  this  increase  of  size  in  our  program  of  mis- 
sionary effort  is  good,  but  there  are  possibilities  of  the 
Church's  getting  too  intimate  with  political  and  in- 
dustrial schemes.  It  may  be  well  to  glance  for  a  moment 
at  the  Christian  method  of  missionary  endeavor.  We 
would  not  deny  the  spread  of  civilization  that  accom- 
panies the  progress  of  many  of  the  more  secular  agencies 
which  work  with  non-Christian  nations,  but  our  new 
sums  of  ^  money  and  our  new  relationships  to  industrial 
leaders  are  not  good  for  us  unless  we  recall  repeatedly 
the  Christian  aim  of  missionary  effort  and  the  Christian 
method  of  that  effort. 

The  ethics  of  method  itself  has  not  receive4  enough  at- 

105 


106       CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

tention  from  Christian  moralists.  We  have  laid  stress 
on  judging  courses  by  their  outcomes, — especially  as  we 
speak  of  the  larger  groups  of  people  are  we  likely  to 
declare  that  any  policy  which  yields  a  right  result  must 
itself  be  right.  We  are  cautioned  not  to  be  too  exacting 
about  means  if  the  manifest  outcome  is  the  betterment  of 
hundreds  of  thousands  or  even  of  millions  of  human  be- 
ings. A  fallacy  lurks  here,  however.  Some  ways  of 
producing  results  are  more  Christian  than  others.  When 
an  advanced  nation  is  treating  with  one  more  backward 
we  must  try  to  get  the  point  of  view  of  that  backward 
nation,  if  we  are  to  consider  the  moral  effect  of  the 
contact  of  the  more  favored  nation  with  the  less  favored. 
Take  an  illustration  from  international  procedure  which 
has  a  bearing  on  all  the  present-day  contacts  of  the 
United  States  with  Latin  America, — missionary  efforts 
included.  We  refer  to  President  Roosevelt's  seizure  of 
territory  for  the  Isthmian  Canal.  Some  facts  stand 
forth  at  once, — the  whole  world  needed  the  Canal, — the 
building  of  the  Canal  was  the  duty  of  the  United  States, 
— the  object  simply  had  to  be  attained.  There  is  noth- 
ing in  the  history  of  the  revolution  of  Panama,  however, 
to  compel  us  to  believe  that  the  United  States  could  not 
have  attained  her  end  by  a  less  violent  method.  Even  the 
Latin  Americans  themselves  were  ready  to  concede  that 
the  United  States  must  be  granted  the  privilege  of  build- 
ing the  highway, — but  no  Latin  American  would  praise 
the  means  by  which  a  route  was  secured. 

There  is  here  no  insinuation  that  the  President  of  the 
United  States  employed  any  methods  that  seemed  to  him 
dishonorable.  He  apparently  forgot,  however,  that  there 
was  before  him  the  whole  problem  of  the  good  feeling 
between  Anglo-Saxon  America  and  Latin  America.     The 


MISSIONARY  EFFORT  107 

abyss  between  the  point  of  view  of  each  of  these  two 
racial  types  is  deep  enough  in  any  event, — and  nothing 
should  have  been  encouraged  which  would  make  that 
abyss  deeper.  Now  all  talk  by  Christian  leaders  about 
the  possibilities  of  a  new  highway  for  the  advance  of 
civilization  and  of  Christianity  must  be  qualified  by  the 
recollection  that  the  manner  of  preempting  a  site  for  the 
highway  worked,  broadly  speaking,  against  the  spread 
of  Christianity.  It  may  be  a  little  early  in  the  day  to 
prescribe  rules  for  international  good  manners,  but  it  is 
permissible  to  ask  if  international  bad  manners  have 
not  been  and  are  not  a  hindrance  to  the  spread  of  the 
Gospel. 

It  seems  hardly  necessary  to  affirm  that  our  expansive 
schemes  of  missionary  procedure  to-day  should  not  blind 
us  to  the  folly  of  all  talk  about  the  enlargement  of  the 
Kingdom  through  wars  of  conquest.  All  that  such  phy- 
sical means  accomplish  is  physical.  When  the  Church 
leader  countenances  a  war  of  conquest  because  of  the 
advantage  which  the  conqueror  will  inevitably  bring  to 
the  conquered,  he  must  not  forget  that  such  advantages 
at  best  are  most  rudimentary.  The  conqueror  can  in- 
deed impose  police  power;  he  can  keep  roads  open  to 
traffic ;  but  the  fact  that  the  Christian  nation  is  the  ruler 
of  the  non-Christian  nation  makes  against  spiritual 
Christianization. 

He  would  be  rash  who  would  deny  that  England  has 
done  much  for  humanity  in  India.  There  have  been  in- 
deed keen  observers  like  Ramsay  McDonald  and  the  late 
Keir  Hardie  who  have  declared  that  it  is  questionable 
whether  England's  conquest  of  India  has  not  on  the 
whole  done  India  more  harm  than  good.  Making  allow- 
ance for  the  hostility  of  both  these  social  leaders  to 


108       CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

capitalistic  imperialism  and  for  the  probability  that  they 
were  monopolized  by  the  disgruntled  natives  in  India, 
we  must  recognize  that  their  opinion  is  at  least  worth 
listening  to.  England  has  given  to  India  modem  high- 
ways, well-managed  systems  of  railroads  and  canals  and 
some  protection  against  famine.  But  England  has  done 
this  with  demand  that  India  pay  the  heavy  interest 
charges  on  the  English  money  invested  in  public  works. 
McDonald  and  Hardie  urge  that  this  tax  on  India  labor 
has  so  depleted  India's  vitality  as  to  render  the  natives 
an  easy  prey  to  disease,  in  spite  of  all  our  scientific 
advance  in  the  knowledge  of  preventive  medicine  and 
sanitation.  "When  we  remember  the  wars  in  India  be- 
fore England  came  and  the  prevalence  of  thuggery  and 
infanticide  we  may  well  suspect  that  the  unqualified  con- 
clusions of  McDonald  and  Hardie  are  not  warranted. 
It  is  true  nevertheless  that  England  has  not  succeeded 
in  conquering  the  soul  of  India.  India  will  not  consent 
that  England  stamp  her  banners  on  the  India  soul. 
Trust  as  we  may  that  an  enlightened  liberalism  in  Eng- 
land will  handle  wisely  the  India  situation,  there  is  no 
disguising  the  resentment  of  the  Indians  at  the  over- 
lordship  of  the  English. 

We  have  heard  missionaries  assert  that  English  ad- 
ministration in  India  gives  the  Church  a  golden  oppor- 
tunity. The  missionary  can  count  on  the  friendly 
cooperation  of  the  government  in  efforts  for  the  uplift 
of  the  native.  He  can  know  that  his  government  is  back 
of  him.  Some  shades  of  the  significance  of  the  bearing 
of  the  Englishman's  self-confidence  on  the  Indian, 
however,  this  optimistic  speech  overlooks.  Any  one  who 
has  observed  missionaries  from  an  overlord  nation  at 
work  in  a  subject  nation  realizes  how  practically  impos- 


MISSIONARY  EFFORT  109 

sible  it  is  to  get  the  half-conscious  or  sub-conscious  feel- 
ing of  overlordship  out  of  the  missionary's  mind.  The 
missionary  may  expatiate  with  stirring  eloquence  on 
human  brotherhood,  but  the  hint  of  mastery  creeps  into 
his  accent  and  gesture  in  spite  of  himself.  And  this 
unconscious  tinge  of  mastery  tends  to  nullify  the  preach- 
ing of  the  Gospel. 

Besides  this,  the  direct  cooperation  of  the  Church  and 
the  over-ruling  government  ties  up  Christianity  to  a 
secular  system,  in  the  opinion  of  the  native.  If  this  is 
true  with  an  empire  which  has  had  so  long  experience 
with  subject  peoples  as  England  has  had,  much  more 
would  it  be  likely  to  be  so  with  a  country  like  the  United 
States.  Those  blazing  patriots  who  are  eager  to  see  the 
United  States  extend  her  influence,  by  conflict  if  neces- 
sary, far  down  into  Latin  America,  in  the  name  of  Chris- 
tian civilization,  would  better  remember  that  the  Ameri- 
can might  be  a  more  impatient  master  than  the  English. 
The  American's  way  of  taking  hold  for  uplift  is  Likely 
to  resemble  a  quick  seizure  by  the  nape  of  the  neck.  It 
does  not  render  such  uplift  any  more  certain  of  success 
to  have  a  group  of  churchmen  standing  by  to  applaud. 

Many  devout  Christians  feel  to-day  that  the  commerce 
of  the  more  favored  nations  with  the  more  backward  is  a 
tremendous  advantage  for  the  spread  of  the  Kingdom 
of  Heaven.  The  Christian  casts  his  gaze  on  so-called 
heathen  lands  and  sees  them  stocked  with  material  good 
things, — with  coal  beds,  with  underground  lakes  of  oil, 
with  soils  rich  in  tropical  fruits,  and  in  rubber.  He 
beholds  the  native  in  abject  poverty  and  he  thrills  with 
a  sincere  desire  to  teach  that  native  how  to  utilize  the 
wealth  lying  about  so  profusely.  Thus  far  well  and 
good.     If  China's  coal  is  to  go  principally  to  China,  and 


110       CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

the  return  for  Mexico's  oil  principally  to  Mexico,  and 
an  equitable  price  for  Central  America's  fruit  to  Central 
America,  and  a  fair  remuneration  for  rubber  to  Africa 
and  South  America,  there  can  be  little  objection.  Cap- 
italism, as  such,  however,  is  not  in  business  primarily 
for  missionary  motives.  Any  aid  that  comes  from  cap- 
italism in  its  direct  dealing  with  the  natives  of  a  back- 
ward country  is  more  accidental  than  intentional.  The 
more  intelligent  of  the  natives  in  an  exploited  land  know 
this,  and  resent  any  coupling  of  philanthropic  profession 
with  the  exploitation  of  their  resources.  This  is  espe- 
cially true  where  the  coveted  riches  are  treasures  like 
mines  and  oil  wells  which  will  sooner  or  later  be  forever 
exhausted. 

The  representatives  of  an  oil  company  with  many, 
many  wells  in  Mexico  recently  testified  before  a  United 
States  Governmental  Commission  as  to  their  aims  in  the 
development  of  Mexico.  The  testimony  was  freely  in- 
terspersed with  expressions  of  good  will  toward  the  peo- 
ple of  Mexico  and  of  deep  sympathy  with  them  in  their 
distresses.  The  Company  avowed  a  willingness  to  co- 
operate with  the  missionary  societies  in  the  uplift  of 
Mexico,  to  the  extent  of  pouring  millions  of  dollars 
through  the  organized  channels  of  the  Church.  One  of 
these  witnesses,  when  questioned  closely,  declared  that 
armed  intervention  in  Mexico  was  unthinkable.  On 
further  questioning,  however,  the  witness  advised  the 
immediate  withdrawal  of  recognition  by  the  United 
States  from  the  constituted  government  of  Mexico,  the 
cooperation  of  good  people  in  the  United  States  with 
good  people  in  Mexico  to  overthrow  the  existing  Mexican 
authority,  the  use  of  the  navy  of  the  United  States  to 
blockade  the  ports  of  Mexico  to  further  this  philanthropic 


MISSIONARY  EFFORT  111 

endeavor,  and  recognized  the  practical  certainty  that  a 
strong  arm  would  have  to  be  employed  in  Mexico  itself 
before  all  this  could  be  brought  about.  Now  what  is  the 
effect  of  such  a  proposed  union  of  imperialistic  business 
and  Christian  philanthropy  on  the  Mexican  mind?  Of 
course  any  such  benevolent  enterprises  may  be  statisti- 
cally successful.  Numerous  enough  responses  can  be 
secured  in  any  community  where  donations  of  money 
are  involved.  But  the  self-respecting  Mexican  turns 
against  the  scheme  with  abhorrence.  Any  self-respect- 
ing missionary  would  likewise  spurn  such  proffers  of 
money  with  abhorrence,  provided  he  knew  what  Chris- 
tian missionary  effort  is. 

We  must  be  on  watch  also  lest  the  handling  of  huge 
amounts  in  missionary  campaigning  dim  our  eyes  to  the 
difference  between  the  advance  of  material  civilization 
and  the  advance  of  the  Christian  spirit.  If  Christianity 
in  our  own  land  cannot  be  adequately  phrased  in  ma- 
terial terms  it  cannot  be  thus  phrased  in  a  non-Christian 
land.  It  is  almost  impossible  to  travel  through  a  non- 
Christian  land  and  not  lose  one's  balance  before  the 
omnipresent  need  of  immediate  physical  relief.  People 
are  so  hungry  and  so  sick  that  the  first  requisite  seems 
food  and  medicine.  Indeed  it  would  be  a  blessedly 
Christian  task  to  send  hundreds  of  Christian  physicians 
among  peoples  that  know  not  the  meaning  of  hygiene 
and  sanitation,  to  say  nothing  of  anaesthetic  and  aseptic 
surgery.  There  is  a  limit,  however,  beyond  which  the 
introduction  of  European  and  American  civilization 
ceases  to  be  a  virtue.  The  non-Christian  world  cer- 
tainly stands  in  need  of  western  science.  But  how  far 
will  the  missionary,  with  the  ample  material  which  he 
will  soon  have,  be  justified  in  urging  a  western  civiliza- 


112      CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

tion  upon  an  oriental  mind,  or  an  Anglo-Saxon  civiliza- 
tion upon  a  Latin  mind?  The  temptation  here  arises 
not  only  out  of  the  apparent  pressing  need  but  also  out 
of  the  passion  for  a  quick  result.  Material  transforma- 
tions can  be  more  definitely  reported  than  can  the  pa- 
tient attempts  to  persuade  the  non-Christian  to  lay  hold 
of  Christianity  and  to  interpret  it  according  to  his  own 
character. 

We  have  just  begun  to  realize  what  a  long  road  we 
must  travel  to  Christianize  the  world  in  a  Christian 
fashion.  Spiritual  Christianization  starts  by  assuming 
the  freedom  of  the  seeker  after  truth.  Genuine  freedom 
means  that  Christianity  is  to  be  sought  in  the  inner 
spirit  rather  than  to  be  put  on  from  without.  Suppose 
China  could  receive  enough  material  resources  to  cut 
down  her  death  rate,  to  banish  the  commoner  diseases, 
to  adopt  a  higher  standard  of  living,  so  that  human  ex- 
istence would  be  richer  than  China  has  ever  known. 
Where  would  we  be  after  all  this  had  been  attained? 
We  would  be  at  the  parting  of  the  paths  where  if  we 
were  foolish  we  would  urge  the  Chinaman  to  go  on  and 
adopt  the  entire  mental  habit  of  western  civilization; 
or  where  if  we  were  wise  we  would  seek  to  persuade  him, 
with  the  grosser  obstacles  removed,  to  undertake  an  in- 
terpretation of  Christianity  after  his  own  mind. 

It  is  one  of  the  most  absurd  fancies  to  imagine  that 
the  full  possibilities  of  Christianity  must  be  called  forth 
chiefly  from  an  occidental  soil.  The  matter-of-factness 
of  the  mentality  turned  out  by  our  modern  industrial 
existence  is  a  check  to  the  understanding  of  Christian- 
ity. If  Christianity  is  to  be  a  world  religion  its  genius 
will  have  to  be  wrought  out  into  manifold  and  altogether 
diverse  racial  expressions.     Is  not  the  oriental  closer  to 


MISSIONARY  EFFORT  113 

the  quality  of  mind  which  was  in  Christ  than  is  the  oc- 
cidental? If  the  oriental  could  be  brought  to  Christ's 
thought  of  God  and  to  Christ 's  spirit  toward  his  fellow- 
man  he  would  find  in  himself  resemblances  to  the  Christ 
habit  of  mind  which  are  all  but  impossible  to  the  occi- 
dental whose  mental  nature  has  been  shaped  by  the 
economic  forces  playing  through  western  society.  It 
would  be  altogether  ridiculous  and  mirth-provoking,  if 
it  were  not  tragic,  to  contemplate  the  incongruity  of 
trying  to  fit  the  teachings  of  Jesus  in  detail  into  the 
categories  of  European  or  American  civilization.  Re- 
flect that  any  predominantly  industrial  mind  must  have 
orderly  plan.  The  mind  of  Jesus  was  indeed  orderly 
with  the  sublime  rationality  which  arose  from  commun- 
ion with  the  Source  of  all  wisdom,  but  not  orderly  after 
the  crisp  briskness  of  the  modern  teacher  who  arranges 
his  deliverances  in  one,  two,  three  regularity.  Jesus 
seemed  to  play  around  the  eternal  conceptions  with  a 
freedom  and  ease  which  are  only  for  him  who  has  the 
secret  of  profound  brooding. 

I  happen  to  know  a  foreign  mission  field  in  which  the 
questions  and  the  answers  in  the  Graded  Bible  Lessons 
used  in  the  United  States  are  translated  directly  into 
Spanish  for  pupils  in  a  Latin  American  environment. 
The  result  is  sometimes  grotesque  and  almost  always  un- 
natural. What  the  Spanish  American  mind  needs  is  to 
develop  its  own  Christian  thinking  in  its  own  terms.  I 
know  a  Christian  denomination  which  translates  a  book 
of  discipline,  framed  distinctly  with  American  conditions 
in  mind,  into  foreign  languages  for  converts  in  non- 
Christian  lands.  This  can  be  easily  remedied.  What 
cannot  be  so  easily  remedied  is  the  temper  of  mind  begot- 
ten under  a  western  environment  which,  when  intrusted 


114       CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

with  large  financial  sums  to  be  expended  in  missionary- 
enterprises,  casts  about  for  some  results  which  will  be 
instantaneously  intelligible  to  the  contributors  of  the 
money,  regardless  of  whether  those  results  are  secured  at 
the  cost  of  the  spiritual  spontaneity  of  the  peoples  aided. 

It  would  be  well  if  the  bustling  and  energetic  mis- 
sionary faring  forth  from  a  capitalistic  home  base  could 
be  delivered  from  the  tyranny  of  the  clock.  One  of  the 
most  harmful  inventions  for  an  occidental,  working  with 
most  non-Christian  peoples,  is  the  pocket  time-piece. 
"What  the  missionary  needs  is  at  least  for  a  season  to 
have  no  time-schedule, — to  steep  himself  in  the  mental 
life  of  the  man  to  whom  he  is  ministering,  in  the  hope 
that  that  life  itself  may  in  turn  seize  the  Gospel  truth 
and  state  it  anew  in  Christian  independence.  Lest  this 
seem  to  be  raving  and  nonsense  let  us  remind  ourselves 
that  it  is  at  bottom  a  thoroughly  scientific  method  capable 
of  wide  application.  Any  teacher  who  strives  to  make 
the  most  of  his  pupils  and  his  subject  matter  proceeds 
with  most  unbusinesslike  irregularity.  He  refuses  to  be 
cramped  with  a  schedule.  Instead  of  marching  directly 
upon  his  theme  he  wanders  all  around  it.  He  drops 
dynamic  hints  for  the  avid  seizures  of  the  young  minds. 
He  is  careful  not  to  do  too  much  himself.  When  he 
discovers  a  pupil  of  first  class  talent  his  aim  is  to  en- 
courage that  pupil  to  do  the  utmost  without  help.  A 
theory  which  he  at  the  beginning  announces  to  his  stu- 
dents from  his  own  point  of  view  may  become  from  their 
angle  something  utterly  different.  Thus  it  is  that 
scientific  knowledge  grows.  The  wisest  teachers  simply 
scatter  germinal  ideas  to  their  students  with  the  com- 
mand to  harvest  from  the  seeds  what  they  can. 

Likewise  Christianity  should  be  so  placed  before  in- 


MISSIONARY  EFFORT  115 

quiring  nations  that  those  nations  may  make  what  they 
will  of  Christianity.  That  God  is  like  Christ  and  that 
man  can  be  like  Christ,— is  the  heart  of  the  Christian 
system.  But  around  this  center  let  the  converts  to 
Christianity  in  non-Christian  lands  build  whatever  body 
they  will.  Chinamen  are  not  Anglo-Saxons  with  a  yel- 
low skin.  Negroes  are  not  white  men  with  black  pig- 
ment. The  Latin  races  are  not  Americans  speaking 
French  or  Spanish  or  Italian.  The  curse  of  a  domineer- 
ing civilization  like  our  own  is  the  impulse  to  force  other 
civilizations  into  its  own  mold.  One  strain  on  Christian- 
ity will  come  when  occidental  Protestantism  sees  its 
money  spent  for  developments  of  Christianity  which 
seem  widely  foreign  to  the  Christianity  that  we  know. 
Abraham  Lincoln  once  said  that  the  Lord  must  be  fond 
of  plain  people  else  He  would  not  have  made  so  many 
of  them.  What  irreverence  to  believe  that  the  Lord 
would  have  created  the  masses  of  humanity  which  are 
still  non-Christian  if  He  had  not  cared  mightily  for  them, 
and  if  He  had  not  beheld  the  rich  religious  contributions 
which  they  would  one  day  make  to  truth  under  the  in- 
spiration of  the  Christian  spirit. 

Akin  to  this  general  consideration  is  another  which 
must  be  kept  in  mind  in  the  approaching  day  of  the  full 
treasury.  If  we  are  to  have  an  ultimate  Christianity 
to  which  all  races  are  to  make  their  spiritual  contribution 
we  shall,  as  we  have  said,  have  to  encourage  those  sepa- 
rate races  to  work  their  problems  through  for  themselves. 
This  means  that  all  missionary  effort  should  aim  at 
financial  self-support  by  the  benefited  peoples  just  as 
rapidly  as  that  self-support  can  be  developed.  It  may 
seem  cruel  to  declare  that  at  times  the  administrator  of 
missionary  funds  should  be  willing  to  see  a  native  worker 


116      CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

lacking  equipment  whicli  contributions  from  outside 
might  readily  secure.  There  will  always  be  a  province 
here  which  can  be  wisely  administered  only  by  delicate 
understanding.  But  it  is  clear  that,  except  in  those 
initial  stages  where  an  enterprise  is  first  being  put  upon 
its  feet,  the  material  support  of  Christianity  should 
come  chiefly  from  the  converts  themselves.  It  is  not 
justifiable  to  act  here  out  of  impulse  or  out  of  unreflect- 
ing generosity.  Immediate  and  crushing  need  must  be 
relieved,  but  the  missionary  duty  is  fundamentally  that 
of  developing  believers  into  free  and  independent  ex- 
pression of  the  religious  experience. 

Along  with  that  self-support  should  go  everything 
that  freedom  implies.  The  native  should  arrive  at  self- 
determination  in  his  own  Christian  organizations.  He 
should  be  allowed  to  walk  in  his  own  way  even  if  he 
makes  bad  blunders, — and  this  not  only  for  his  own 
good  but  for  the  good  of  all  Christianity.  Only  thus 
will  he  achieve  freedom  and  only  thus  will  his  speech 
and  deed  be  distinctive  of  his  race.  If  Japanese  love 
of  the  beautiful  is  ever  to  adorn  Christianity  it  should 
be  in  terms  of  characteristically  Japanese  art.  If  racial 
peculiarities  are  worth  saving — and  they  are — they  only 
can  be  preserved  by  the  new  converts  themselves.  Free 
activity  is  above  all  else  important:  it  is  the  spirit  of 
Christianity  itself.  The  liberty  of  the  sons  of  God  means 
all  the  types  of  liberty  of  all  the  sons  of  God. 

We  should  aim  to  cut  the  convert  loose  from  depend- 
ence on  a  foreign  influence  for  the  sake  of  his  own 
self-respect  as  well  as  for  the  contribution  which  he  can 
make  when  he  is  left  more  to  himself.  Except  where 
there  is  some  close  tie  like  that  of  blood,  or  most  inti- 
mate friendship,  a  financial  dependence  will  sooner  or 


MISSIONARY  EFFORT  117 

later  issue  in  a  servile  spirit.  It  is  not  wise  to  make  a 
Chinese,  or  other  foreign  convert,  feel  dependent  on  any 
money  that  comes  from  America.  There  is  some  justice 
in  the  jibe  of  his  own  countrymen  that  in  such  depend- 
ence he  is  a  rice  Christian,  or  that  he  is  bought  with 
American  gold.  The  ideal  is  that  the  missionary  should 
inaugurate  Christianity,  leave  the  convert  firmly  es- 
tablished on  his  own  feet,  and  then  go  back  home, — or  to 
some  other  field. 

Of  course  the  ideal  as  thus  bluntly  put  has  a  trace  of 
caricature.  "We  are  really  thinking  of  formal  relation- 
ships. It  would  be  unhappy  for  Christendom  if  the 
development  of  an  independent  spirit  in  converts  to 
Christianity  meant  that  all  bonds  were  at  last  to  be  cut 
between  the  converts  and  the  missionaries.  On  the  basis 
of  the  friendship  established  on  foreign  fields  we  may 
properly  desire  that  the  brotherly  relations  shall  con- 
tinue forever.  But  let  us  remember  that  brotherly  rela- 
tions imply  a  meeting  on  the  plane  of  equality  where 
each  fully  respects  every  other  without  a  trace  even  of 
inner  condescension  on  the  one  hand  or  dependence  on 
the  other.  A  band  of  earnest  Christian  missionaries 
were  sometime  ago  grievously  hurt  by  a  remark  of  a 
native  Indian  Christian  preacher  of  superior  training 
and  ability.  The  missionaries  had  just  communicated 
to  the  Indian  that  new  plans  for  missionary  progress 
meant  that  American  missionaries  would  soon  be  swarm- 
ing into  India  by  hundreds  and  thousands.  The  Indian 
sighed  dejectedly  and  exclaimed,  ''What  has  poor  India 
done  to  deserve  such  an  affliction?'^  The  comment 
seemed  unkind  and  ungrateful,  but  it  would  be  most 
just  if  missionary  effort  were  to  be  conceived  of  as  any- 
thing other  than  the  attempt  to  help  India  to  an  in- 
dependent seizure  of  Christianity  on  her  own  account. 


CHAPTER  IX 

THE  BODY   OF   CHRIST 

If  we  ask  the  ordinary  believer  what  is  meant  by- 
conventional  expressions  as  to  the  Body  of  Christ  he 
will  probably  reply  that  the  body  of  Christ  on  earth  is 
the  group  of  all  who  in  spirit  follow  Christ.  He  speaks 
thus  out  of  a  shade  of  unwillingness  to  identify  the 
material  revelation  of  the  Christ  in  our  day  with  the 
organized  Church.  It  is  a  little  difficult  to  think  of  the 
organized  activities  of  the  Church  as  altogether  con- 
stituting the  Body  of  Christ  in  the  Pauline  sense.  The 
ordinary  believer  also  would  feel  that  there  are  many 
formal  communicants  of  the  Church  who  are  not  entitled 
to  be  called  members  of  the  Body  of  Christ,  and  that 
there  are  also  multitudes  of  persons  outside  the  Church 
who  are  justly  worthy  to  be  considered  members  of  a 
spiritual  Christly  organism. 

Even  if  we  were  to  look  upon  the  organized  Church  as 
deserving  the  figurative  characterization  of  the  Christ 
Body  we  should  not  at  first  think  of  the  more  material 
phases  of  the  organization  as  entitled  to  such  high  de- 
scription. For  these  material  activities  often  impress 
us  as  forms  of  Christian  duty  that  have  to  be  gone 
through  somehow  without  any  surpassing  spiritual  value 
on  their  own  account.  This  impression,  however,  must 
be  mistaken.  If  we  are  to  have  an  organization  on  earth 
which  we  can  fitly  call  a  Body  of  Christ  we  must  order 
the  Christly  purpose  into  the  lowliest  activities  of  that 

118 


THE  BODY  OF  CHRIST  119 

body  so  that  these  can  flash  forth  something  of  the 
Christ  spirit.  In  the  preceding  chapters  we  have  been 
discussing  most  practical  questions,  so  practical  that 
some  may  wonder  that  we  should  deem  it  necessary  to 
discuss  them  at  all.  Why  not  leave  such  matters  to  the 
interplay  of  the  work-a-day  forces  and  reserve  our 
strength  for  more  spiritual  concerns?  Take  it  for 
granted  that  much  earthly  work  must  be  done  by  any 
Church  on  earth.  Let  such  work  be  put  through  with 
as  little  noise  as  possible,  and  as  much  out  of  sight  as 
possible,  while  we  press  on  to  the  higher  duties. 

If,  however,  we  are  to  speak  of  the  Church  as  a  Body 
of  Christ  we  may  just  as  well  make  the  utmost  of  the 
figure.  The  harder  and  tougher  the  facts  of  life  the 
more  irresistible  their  impact  on  the  consciousness  of 
mankind.  If  these  financial  affairs  about  which  we  have 
been  talking  are  among  the  inescapable  aspects  of  daily 
life,  if  they  bulk  more  largely  in  the  human  consciousness 
than  almost  anything  else,  why  should  they  not  be  re- 
garded as  possibly  subject  to  the  spirit  of  Christ?  Why 
cannot  these  prosaic  phases  of  our  existence  be  avowedly 
joined  with  those  forces  which  we  conceive  of  as  naturally 
belonging  to  the  Body  of  Christ?  Christianity  is  not 
just  an  ideal  floating  above  the  heads  of  men,  to  which 
they  look  up  for  inspiration  as  they  trudge  along  a  dusty 
pathway.  The  ideal  is  to  be  a  working  fact  down  amid 
the  dust  of  the  roadway  itself. 

If  Paul's  figure  means  anything  it  implies  that  the 
organized  Church  on  earth  is  to  render  the  same  service 
to  Christ  himself  that  Christ 's  own  body  rendered  during 
his  life  in  Judea  and  Galilee.  We  are  to  conceive  of  the 
Church  as  an  organism  vitally  responsive  to  Christ  im- 
pulses.    The  incarnation  of  Jesus  signifies  more  than 


120      CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

that  Jesus  lived  in  a  human  body.  It  means  that  he 
experienced  a  normal  human  existence  in  the  midst  of  the 
most  commonplace  details  of  life, — that  he  worked  at  a 
trade,  that  he  ate  and  drank  with  men,  that  he  walked 
along  the  streets  of  cities  and  in  and  out  of  homes  and 
shops.  Assuming  that  his  career  on  earth  ran  through 
a  period  of  about  thirty-three  years,  how  much  of  that 
time  was  given  to  what  we  might  pronounce  the  more 
specific  spiritual  exercises?  The  greater  number  of  his 
years  was  passed  in  an  existence  to  all  outward  appear- 
ances about  like  that  of  his  fellows.  And  the  greater 
number  of  hours  each  day  had  to  be  devoted  to  human 
processes  which  we  might  not  think  of  as  definitely  re- 
ligious. This  is  much  of  the  significance  of  the  incarna- 
tion,— that  Jesus  chose  the  ordinary  conditions  of  hu- 
man life  and  showed  how  a  divine  life  could  be  poured 
through  those  conditions.  Similarly  if  we  believe  in  the 
Church  as  anew  incarnating  the  spirit  of  Christ  we  shall 
grievously  err  if  we  hold  that  the  Church  is  doing  the 
Christly  work  only  when  it  is  engaged  in  the  specific- 
ally religious  duty.  The  commoner  tasks  must  be  looked 
upon  also  as  spheres  for  revelation  by  incarnation. 

Much  that  we  have  said  may  suggest  that  the  world 
of  finance  into  which  the  Church  is  more  and  more  press- 
ing is  almost  hopeless  as  a  subject  for  Christian  re- 
demption. If  we  are  tempted  to  such  despair  let  us 
remember  that  at  different  epochs  of  the  Church's  his- 
tory philosophers  have  arisen  who  have  looked  even  upon 
matter  itself  as  inherently  evil.  They  have  shrunk  back 
from  the  doctrine  that  the  Son  of  God  took  upon  himself 
human  flesh  because  they  have  declared  that  flesh  cor- 
rupt. They  have  pronounced  too  against  many  of  the 
processes  of  life  and  against  many  of  the  phases  of  hu- 


THE  BODY  OF  CHRIST  121 

man  experience  as  if  these  could  not  ever  be  fit  vehicles 
for  the  Christ  life.  All  of  which  heresy  has  been  re- 
peatedly condemned.  The  charm  of  the  incarnation  is 
that  the  Christ  so  wrought  among  the  commonest  of  hu- 
man duties  that  men  beheld  the  glory  of  God  full  of 
grace  and  truth. 

May  we  say  that  if  masses  of  mankind  ever  are  to  be 
reached  with  a  Gospel  that  transforms  even  a  material 
and  industrial  environment  they  will  have  to  be  reached 
as  a  Church  embodies  Christian  truth  in  material  and 
industrial  terms?  Some  men  never  see  anything  of  re- 
ligion except  as  they  behold  a  churchman.  Some  never 
hear  anything  suggestive  of  Christianity  except  as  sub- 
stantial church  bells  peal  forth  an  arresting  melody. 
The  ordinary  mind  must  physically  see  something.  Even 
the  consciousness  of  Jesus  seems  to  have  been  first 
awakened  to  the  significance  of  the  Father's  house  by 
the  spectacle  of  the  rising  altar  fires  and  by  the  rhythm 
of  the  chanting  of  the  priests.  All  of  us  would  agree  to 
this.  We  shall  all  sooner  or  later  have  to  agree  further 
that  some  men  never  will  see  Christianity  in  its  social 
bearing  until  the  Church  strides  forth  to  the  market 
place  to  buy  and  sell  honestly,  until  the  Church  employs 
laborers  and  treats  them  according  to  the  Christ  stand- 
ards, and  until  the  Church  uses  its  funds  to  lift  on  high 
the  doctrine  of  the  stewardship  of  wealth. 

But  there  are  good  people  who  will  have  it  that  the 
instant  the  Church  begins  to  make  these  worldly  con- 
tacts it  loses  something  of  the  eiquisiteness  of  the  flavor 
of  its  spirituality.  Likewise  some  critics  of  the  incarna- 
tion might  say  that  the  instant  incarnated  divinity  be- 
gins to  push  through  the  streets  of  Jerusalem  divinity 
loses  something  of  its  fineness.     There  is  indeed  com- 


122      CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

promise  when  the  Church  advances  directly  into  the 
shops  and  marts  of  men, — compromise  in  that  at  any 
given  moment  there  is  a  great  deal  that  the  Church  must 
put  up  with  and  get  along  with.  Since,  however,  there 
is  no  absolute  standard  to  which  we  can  appeal  we  must 
remember  that  living  in  this  world  consists  in  always 
making  the  best  possible  ethical  adjustments  in  concrete 
situations.  Is  it  more  righteous  for  the  Church  to  stand 
off  and  shout  to  men  what  they  shall  do,  or  to  cast  it- 
self into  the  conditions  among  which  men  labor  and  try 
there  to  live  forth  the  Christian  spirit?  To  live  forth 
the  Gospel  thus  under  the  actual  conditions  of  modern 
existence  is  a  severer  tax  on  loyalty  to  an  ideal  than 
vocally  to  preach  the  ideal.  When  all  is  said  Christian- 
ity consists  largely  in  our  work-a-day  duty  of  living  to- 
gether. If  we  were  all  guests  in  some  king 's  palace,  with 
bounty  heaped  upon  us  from  the  king's  treasury,  living 
together  would  chiefly  mean  observing  the  rules  of  eti- 
quette, being  considerate  of  one  another's  rights  in  con- 
versation, and  in  general  being  pleasant  and  agreeable. 
Living  together,  however,  in  the  market  place  or  in  the 
counting  house  or  in  the  shops  or  in  the  office  calls  for 
quite  a  different  order  of  brotherly  regard.  It  has  been 
said  by  some  wise  man  with  a  slight  tinge  of  cynicism 
that  if  friends  wish  to  remain  friends  they  should  never 
allow  financial  issues  to  arise  between  them.  But  the 
Church  cannot  withdraw  from  life  and  meet  human 
beings  in  afternoon-tea  fashion,  or  even  on  the  plane  of 
a  friendship  which  leaves  material  conditions  entirely  to 
one  side.  Most  dwellers  on  earth  have  to  work  for  a 
living.  Increasingly  the  Church  has  to  descend  into 
the  money-making  world  for  her  living.  If  Christianity 
cannot  be  revealed  through  Christian  principles  in  all 


THE  BODY  OF  CHRIST  123 

the  realms  that  we  have  discussed,  then  the  Church  has 
not  yet  mastered  the  secret  of  teaching  truth  by  incarna- 
tion. 

Suppose  we  tarry  a  little  longer  around  this  possibility 
of  a  spiritual  organism's  making  a  divine  revelation 
through  its  existence  in  material  conditions.  What  does 
life  mean?  Adequate  definition  is,  of  course,  out  of  the 
question.  But  we  know  the  most  truly  alive  organism 
is  the  one  which  can  go  into  almost  any  environment, 
seize  out  of  that  environment  the  elements  for  its  own 
life  and  transform  those  elements  into  lofty  spiritual 
values.  How  mistaken  to  fancy  that  Christianity  is  a 
delicate  plant  which  can  flourish  only  under  the  most 
exquisitely  prepared  environment.  Christianity  has  in- 
deed never  yet  had  an  adequate  and  suitable  environ- 
ment, but  it  can  make  at  least  a  beginning  in  any  cir- 
cumstances. The  present  industrial  and  social  world 
begets  perhaps  more  pessimism  in  the  souls  of  the 
spiritually  minded  than  any  other  sphere  of  human  ex- 
istence. Yet  if  the  Church  is  wise  it  will  grasp  the 
opportunities  in  this  environment  to  show  that  in  the 
worst  of  conditions  the  best  of  spiritual  impulses  can  be 
bodied  forth. 

One  mark  of  life  is  thus  the  power  to  utilize  environ- 
ment. Another  test  is  the  power  to  transform  environ- 
ment. Guided  by  her  ideals  of  the  human  and  spiritual 
values  the  Church  should  look  upon  the  business  world 
as  a  sphere  in  which  to  transform  the  conditions  under 
which  men  live.  In  our  study  of  Church  history  we 
have  all  been  impressed  with  the  influence  of  differing 
sets  of  conditions  upon  religious  life.  This  does  not 
mean  that  Christianity  is  a  plastic  stuff  molded  into 
varying  forms  by  the  potter  lingers  of  successive  eras. 


124       CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

It  means  instead  that  'le  Church  has  vitality  enough  to 
grasp  the  materials  of  ny  epoch  as  at  least  the  occasion 
for  a  fresh  manifest  a  on  of  spiritual  excellence.  We 
have  perhaps  not  dii  y  pondered  the  truth  that  the 
Church  just  by  being  luch  alive  at  successive  eras  has 
made  and  remade  the  e:ivironments  through  which  it  has 
lived.  AU  this  becon  s  more  important  if  we  accept 
some  of  the  modern  i:,  ories  as  to  the  function  of  eco- 
nomic factors  in  history.  History  has  been  to  an  appre- 
ciable extent  re-writtt.  in  the  past  quarter  century  by 
scholars  who  have  emp.  asized  the  power  of  economic  in- 
fluences in  determining  careers  of  nations  and  even  the 
existence  of  nations,  ^c  is  gross  materialism  to  sink 
down  with  a  gasp  befoi  the  play  of  these  forces  and  to 
cry  out  that  ideal  ele  nts  cannot  count.  If  ideal  ele- 
ments are  to  count,  ho>  cver,  in  the  midst  of  the  stream 
of  these  admittedly  sv,  It  and  deep  currents,  they  can 
count  only  as  the  Chi  rch  proclaims  them  and  as  she 
does  her  part  to  show  i  breasting  the  tug  and  pull  of 
economic  currents  whai  the  ideals  mean. 

It  is  objected  to  ide...  interpretations  of  history  that 
even  if  the  forces  whicii  play  in  the  economic  realm  back 
of  the  policies  of  state;  uen  are  not  altogether  material- 
istic they  are  at  least  i.  ipersonal.  But  there  is  nothing 
insuperable  in  the  path  of  making  these  forces  personal 
as  aiming  at  the  realizaaon  of  personal  values.  It  will 
not  avail  for  the  Church  to  rail  at  the  heartlessness  which 
works  to-day  on  a  wo r id- wide  scale  if  she  herself  does 
nothing  to  dower  impersonal  powers  with  a  spiritual 
tendency.  The  soullessness  of  the  economic  influences 
which  shape  even  the  destinies  of  nations  is  but  an 
implication  of  the  com.uonplace,  everyday  doctrine  that 
business  is  business.     If  it  is  possible  to  make  business 


THE  BODY  OF  CHRIST  125 

in  the  limited  sphere  moral  and  humane,  it  is  possible 
also  to  introduce  morality  and  humanity  into  financial 
forces  that  monopolize  even  an  international  theater. 
The  first  duty  in  all  such  problems  is  to  take  hold  and 
get  a  leverage  somewhere.  The  Church  will  soon  be,  if 
it  is  not  now,  in  mastery  over  sufficient  industrial  forces 
at  least  to  make  a  start  even  toward  a  better  international 
order. 

We  are  not  concerned,  however,  merely  with  the  out- 
ward results  to  be  won  by  the  effort  of  the  Church  to 
embody  Christian  spirit  in  her  material  practices.  We 
are  thinking  also  of  the  good  wrought  on  the  mind  of  the 
Church  herself  by  the  handling  of  material  resources  to 
show  forth  the  spirit  of  Christ.  The  modem  psycho- 
logist tells  us  that  the  human  hand  has  had  quite  as 
much  to  do  in  developing  the  mental  power  of  the  indi- 
vidual and  of  the  race  as  has  the  eye  or  the  ear.  It  is 
through  the  grasp  of  objects  by  the  hand  that  perspective 
in  sight  is  developed,  and  that  tendencies  to  inaccuracy 
in  sight  and  in  hearing  are  corrected.  If  it  were  not  for 
the  hand  the  eye  might  conceivably  see  everj1:hing  upon 
a  flat  surface,  or  at  least  it  might  not  discern  quickly 
the  spatially  real  from  the  fanciful  or  illusory.  We 
speak  of  the  powers  of  the  Church  as  the  hand  of  God. 
Such  speech  suggests  a  hand  like  that  which  clasps  the 
hand  of  a  brother,  or  that  rests  in  kindliness  upon  a 
child's  head.  We  may  just  as  well  think  also  of  more 
prosaic  activities  as  also  the  touch  of  the  hand  of  God 
upon  human  life.  In  spite  of  all  that  we  have  said 
about  the  need  of  developing  a  race  of  prophets  who  can 
give  themselves  to  brooding  without  overmuch  care  as 
to  whether  their  utterances  conform  to  strict  business 
principles  or  not,  we  must  also  say  that   the  general 


126       CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

thought  of  the  Church  as  to  spiritual  realities, — the 
visions  of  the  Church,  so  to  speak,  of  the  lofty  spirituali- 
ties,— must  be  brought  into  perspective  and  must  be 
tested  as  to  their  substantiality  by  working  contact  with 
the  world  of  matter. 

Back  in  the  earlier  ages,  when  the  Church  discounted 
the  use  of  material  forces  by  the  devouter  spirits,  think- 
ers gave  themselves  to  all  excesses  of  unsubstantial  specu- 
lations. The  debates  of  that  era  as  to  the  lot  of  spirits 
in  another  world,  as  to  the  nature  of  the  future  rewards 
to  be  meted  out  to  the  saints,  and  of  the  punishments  to 
be  heaped  on  the  sinners, — all  these  seem  to-day  far  out 
of  touch  with  the  universe  in  which  we  live.  They  were 
out  of  touch  also  with  the  world  in  which  those  debaters 
lived.  We  could  not  get  a  hearing  for  such  speculation 
to-day  because  we  are  more  open  to  the  pressure  of  the 
system  of  things  around  us.  To  say  that  the  theologians 
of  that  early  day  had  their  heads  in  the  clouds  is  just 
another  way  of  saying  that  they  did  not  have  their  feet 
on  the  earth. 

A  concrete  earthly  situation  is  an  excellent  corrective 
for  the  tendency  to  overnicety  in  theological  speculation. 
A  shrewd  teacher  once  advocated  the  training  of  mind 
by  the  pupil's  use  of  manual  tools  for  the  reason  that  if 
a  boy  made  a  mistake  with  a  knife  he  might  cut  his 
finger, — whereas  a  purely  intellectual  error  has  no  such 
immediately  painful  cutting  edge.  We  would  not  have 
intercourse  with  that  world  which  is  controlled  by  money 
dull  the  sharpness  of  a  prophet's  incisiveness,  but  we 
would  have  those  laboring  to  bring  in  the  Kingdom  of 
Heaven  learn  the  patience  which  is  necessary  in  moraliz- 
ing business  and  finance.  In  face  of  all  our  ideals  and 
theories  there  is  a  refractory  stubbornness  about  the 


THE  BODY  OF  CHRIST  127 

forces  in  the  business  world :  to  be  met  only  by  Christian 
patience.  There  are  also  inexplicable  peculiarities  in 
human  nature  which  crop  out  only  as  we  meet  men  in  the 
shop  or  the  market  place.  Inasmuch  as  we  are  insisting 
upon  a  revelation  of  the  Gospel  which  will  exalt  patience 
and  charity  we  may  just  as  well  make  the  most  of  our 
opportunities  to  control  sums  of  money  by  utilizing 
every  opportunity  for  the  development  of  these  spiritual 
graces.  But  this  does  not  imply  acquiescence.  It  im- 
plies patient  continuance  and  big-hearted  charitableness 
as  we  dig  away  at  the  imperfection  around  us. 

One  reward  of  the  deliberate  use  of  material  goods  with 
high  moral  responsibility  is  the  development  of  a  quick- 
ness and  sensitiveness  of  ethical  feeling  which  is  like 
the  alertness  of  a  nervous  system  which  is  most  alive. 
There  can  be  little  doubt  that  the  handling  of  material 
properties  with  thought  chiefly  focussed  on  those  proper- 
ties themselves,  makes  for  a  moral  sluggishness  and  inert- 
ness which  is  a  positive  drag  on  the  wheels  of  the  King- 
dom of  God.  Wendell  Phillips  once  said  that  the  un- 
responsiveness of  the  North  to  anti-slavery  agitation  was 
due  to  the  fact  that  the  North  as  well  as  the  South  was 
choked  with  cotton  dust  and  cankered  with  gold.  This 
is  a  familiar  phenomenon  in  the  history  of  every  phase 
of  spiritual  progress.  To  meet  riches  in  a  mood  of  sur- 
render to  the  secular  temper  deadens  the  sensibility  of 
that  Church  which  should  be  the  Body  of  Christ.  We 
have,  however,  emphasized  this  side  of  the  truth  so  ex- 
tensively that  we  have  been  in  danger  of  forgetting 
another  aspect, — namely  the  possibility  of  such  honest 
dealing  with  riches  when  human  issues  are  up  as  to 
avoid  being  choked  with  cotton  dust  or  cankered  with 
gold,  and  as  to  develop  an  instantaneousness  of  moral 


128       CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

response  which  is  like  an  extraordinary  sense  of  sight  or 
hearing  or  touch.  We  know  that  it  is  in  these  finer 
stirrings  that  full  physical  vigor  shows  itself.  In  many 
forms  of  experience  an  excellent  body  will  develop  such 
sensitiveness  as  to  become  aware  of  subtle  changes  in  its 
environment  before  these  changes  can  be  caught  by  more 
sluggish  nerves.  The  scout,  for  example,  who  keeps  his 
bodily  forces  in  topmost  vigor  sees  farther  and  hears 
more  keenly  than  the  casual  tramper  through  the  woods. 
He  can  even  develop  a  mysterious  awareness  of  direction 
which  enables  him  to  orient  himself  without  stopping  to 
locate  the  east.  The  ideal  for  the  Christian  Church  is 
such  integrity  and  humaneness  in  its  work  even  with 
the  material  properties  which  come  into  its  hand,  that 
out  of  its  moral  soundness  shall  arise  a  sensitiveness  to 
the  presence  of  evil  which  will  make  the  Church  the 
advance  runner  toward  all  necessary  industrial  and  so- 
cial transformations. 

Every  student  of  current  questions  must  feel  that 
popular  alignment  of  the  Church  among  the  great  con- 
servative forces  is  rather  dubious  praise.  It  is  true  that 
many  churchmen  rejoice  in  the  placing  of  the  Church 
among  the  steadying  factors  in  our  modern  civilization. 
Conservatism  is  indeed  well  worth  while  if  it  means  the 
thoroughgoing  insistence  on  the  everlasting  human  val- 
ues. Christianity, — and  the  Judaism  out  of  which 
Christianity  arose, — have  always  been  conservative  in 
that  they  have  stood  for  those  ideas  of  the  worth  of 
human  life  which  were  among  the  earliest  conceptions 
of  the  Hebrews.  But  we  cannot  restrain  a  suspicion 
that  this  is  not  what  is  meant  when  many  churchmen 
speak  of  the  Church  as  conservative.     Some  churchmen 


THE  BODY  OF  CHRIST  129 

have  a  consciousness  of  the  might  of  the  Church  as  a 
bulwark  against  social,  especially  against  industrial, 
change.  There  is  altogether  too  much  reason  for  fear 
that  when  many  defenders  of  the  Church  speak  of  the 
conservatism  of  the  Church,  they  at  bottom  think  of  the 
sacredness  of  property  rights  as  over  and  above  human 
rights.  We  may  be  pardoned  for  not  being  excessively 
enthusiastic  when  editors  of  Wall  Street  financial  baro- 
metric reports  call  loudly  for  revivals  of  old-time  re- 
ligion. 

It  would  be  a  gloomy  reflection  if  we  were  to  conceive 
of  the  Church  as  conservative  only  in  a  standpat  sense, 
important  as  a  social  ballast  may  be  in  storms  of  wild 
reform.  If  the  Church  is  to  exert  conservative  influence 
it  must  always  do  so  not  in  the  name  of  the  property 
values  but  in  that  rather  of  the  welfare  of  men.  If 
some  days  it  is  to  be  steadying  there  are  other  days  when 
it  should  be  unsettling  and  disturbing.  Its  closeness  to 
large  financial  operations  should  give  it  a  quick  intuition 
as  to  any  inhumanities  in  these  operations.  To  the 
credit  of  the  Church  let  us  say  that  when  moral  issues 
are  once  clearly  raised  it  will  sooner,  rather  than  later, 
get  around  to  an  unflinching  stand  for  the  right.  In 
such  obvious  evils  as  the  barter  in  human  flesh,  or  the 
traffic  in  degrading  drinks,  the  Church  has  usually  stood 
for  human  justice.  The  Church,  however,  has  not  al- 
ways shown  keenness  in  detecting  the  evils  lurking  in 
beginnings.  It  has  had  to  wait  until  the  wickedness 
unmistakably  declared  itself.  Cannot  the  conscience  of 
the  Church  become  so  sensitive  to  evil  tendencies  as  to 
detect  them  at  their  first  slight  stirrings  ?  As  we  review 
the  course  of  the  centuries  we  can  see  many  crises  where, 


130       CHURCH  FINANCE  AND  SOCIAL  ETHICS 

if  the  Church  had  been  morally  alert,  fearful  social  evils 
might  have  been  plucked  out  at  the  start ;  American  slav- 
ery, for  example. 

We  are  aware  of  the  difficulties  of  keeping  alive  an 
electric  moral  sensitiveness  in  the  daily  contact  with  the 
riches  of  this  world.  What  Jesus  said  about  the  peril 
of  wealth  for  the  individual  is  equally  valid  as  to  the 
peril  of  wealth  for  an  organization.  Yet  the  moral 
miracle  can  be  wrought:  the  Church  can  walk  in  the 
midst  of  money  and  use  the  money  aright.  It  can  grow 
into  grace  and  truth,  changing  to  meet  changing  environ- 
ments, and  transforming  environments  with  newer  and 
fresher  moral  values.  But  this  can  only  be  done  as  it 
brings  the  spirit  of  Christ  in  manifold  incarnation  into 
the  closest  touch  with  the  processes  by  which  gold  is 
earned  and  expended  and  invested  and  given  away. 
These  everyday  processes  are  among  the  basically  phy- 
siologic energies  of  a  true  Body  of  Christ.  Jesus  did 
not  despise  this  world's  goods  and  he  did  not  surrender 
to  them.  He  taught  the  control  of  wealth.  Through 
such  control  comes  one  of  the  fine  opportunities  of  the 
Church  to  show  forth  in  earthly  forms  the  grace  and 
truth  which  are  in  Jesus. 


THE   END 


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